Ann Lewandowski knows all about pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the companies that shape the U.S. drug market. Her job, as a policy advocate at drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, was to tell patient and physician groups about the PBMs’ role in high drug prices.
Armed with that knowledge, Lewandowski filed a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit in February. Rather than targeting the PBMs, however, she went after a big company that uses one — her own employer, Johnson & Johnson.
Lewandowski charges in her lawsuit that by contracting with the PBM Express Scripts, which is part of the insurance giant Cigna, Johnson & Johnson — which fired her in April — failed in its duty to ensure reasonable drug prices for its more than 50,000 U.S. employees.
By choosing an Express Scripts plan, she charged, J&J cost employees “millions of dollars in the form of higher payments for prescription drugs, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher coinsurance, higher copays, and lower wages or limited wage growth.”
Lewandowski, 40, from outside Madison, Wisconsin, relies on an expensive multiple sclerosis drug. She brought the lawsuit, she said, because she “had trouble aligning the policy positions” she reported on as a J&J employee “with the actions I experienced as a health plan user.”
In recent years, the opaque business practices of PBMs have drawn fi …