NEW YORK, Oct 9 (Reuters) - CVS Health ( CVS ),

UnitedHealth Group ( UNH ) and Cigna ( CI ) have asked U.S.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and commissioners

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya to disqualify

themselves from an FTC lawsuit that has accused the companies of

unlawfully inflating insulin prices.

The three companies own the country's largest pharmacy

benefit managers - Caremark, Optum and Express Scripts. They

filed their motions with the FTC's in-house court and shared it

with Reuters.

The companies said Khan, along with Slaughter and Bedoya,

displayed bias against pharmacy benefit managers and prejudged

their pricing models.

CVS pointed to the commissioners' claims that volume-based

discounts, or rebates, lead to higher prices for patients, and

to Khan's appearance at a National Community Pharmacist

Association event in 2022.

The group, made up of independent pharmacists, has

criticized pharmacy benefit managers.

"Event participants wore anti-PBM paraphernalia, including

pins that vilified PBMs as "bloodsuckers" and shirts depicting

PBMs as vampires," the document read.

UnitedHealth ( UNH ) said the commissioners' appearances at

anti-pharmacy benefit manager events showed their prejudice.

Cigna's ( CI ) motion pointed to Khan's public statements and said

they show "she has already made up her mind regarding the key

questions at issue in this matter..".

Any process that will involve Khan, will lack the "very

appearance of complete fairness" that due process requires, the

document read.

Express Scripts supported the CVS complaint.

The FTC suit accuses CVS Health's ( CVS ) Caremark, UnitedHealth's ( UNH )

Optum, and Cigna's ( CI ) Express Scripts of unfairly limiting access

to insulin drugs with lower list prices and steering patients

toward more expensive drugs to increase the spread of profit

from negotiated discounts.

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment.

CVS's response also pointed to statements published by the

commissioners in 2022, stating PBMs exclude cheaper generics

from plans and 2024 congressional testimony describing PBMs as

"middlemen" between drugmakers and patients seeking access to

medications.

In recent years, Amazon ( AMZN ) and Meta's

Facebook tried and failed to have Khan removed from their

antitrust cases.

(Reporting by Amina Niasse in New York; Additional reporting by

Jody Godoy in New York and Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; Editing

by Caroline Humer, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Arun Koyyur)