An association representing more than 21,000 community pharmacies has joined a growing list of opposition against UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of radiology vendor Change Healthcare.
The National Community Pharmacists Association said it just recently met with the Department of Justice to voice concerns about the $13 billion deal. It believes the union would create “another corporate monster” it expects would wield an unfair competitive advantage to “gobble up more market share.”
“This deal would give UHG a trove of intelligence on its smaller competitors, including thousands of independent pharmacies and their patients,” association CEO B. Douglas Hoey, MBA, said Sept. 30. “We believe it would use that intelligence to steer patients away from local pharmacies and send them to their own mail-order business.”
UHG—which also operates UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest commercial insurer, and pharmacy benefits manager Optum—first announced plans to acquire Change in January. But it’s drawn growing opposition since then from Change’s stockholders, the American Antitrust Institute and the American Hospital Association. Amid these concerns, the DOJ has launched an investigation into the deal and considered filing a lawsuit to block it.
Hoey and colleagues noted that Change runs a “switch” that routes claims from pharmacies to insurers and benefits managers. The latter is tasked with dictating which pharmacies patients use, how much they pay at the counter, and reimbursement for such services. The NCPA sees info flowing through these switches as highly valuable and believes placing it in UnitedHealth’s hands will create a “massively unfair advantage.”
“That data will be used to undercut reimbursements and raise fees on independent pharmacies,” Hoey said. “It will be used to steer patients to UHG’s health plan and Optum’s mail-order pharmacy. This merger is a threat to fair competition, independent pharmacies, and patient choice.”
Beyond pharma, Nashville-based, Blackstone Group-backed Change Healthcare offers various solutions in radiology, cardiology and other specialties. Those include medical imaging consulting, enterprise storage solutions, revenue cycle management, data analytics and clinical decision support, according to its website. In April, the American Medical Association voiced concerns that UnitedHealth could use physician reimbursement data from Change’s databases to unfairly steer rate negotiations.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.