01:05 PM EST, 01/14/2025 (MT Newswires) -- (Updates with CVS Health's ( CVS ) response in the fifth and sixth paragraphs.)

UnitedHealth Group's ( UNH ) OptumRx, CVS Health's ( CVS ) Caremark Rx and Cigna's ( CI ) Express Scripts marked up a number of specialty generic drugs at their affiliated pharmacies by hundreds or thousands of percent, the US Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.

The practice allowed the three pharmacy benefit managers and their affiliated specialty pharmacies to generate revenue of more than $7.3 billion from dispensing drugs in excess of their projected acquisition costs from 2017 to 2022, the FTC said.

Citing a second interim staff report on the prescription drug middleman industry, the FTC said the three pharmacy benefit managers got "such significant revenue all while patient, employer, and other health care plan sponsor payments for drugs steadily increased annually."

FTC Chair Lina Khan said the report found that the three pharmacy benefit managers increased costs for various lifesaving drugs, including for heart disease and cancer.

"It is inappropriate and misleading to draw broad conclusions from cherry-picked 'specialty generic' outliers, as the FTC has done in both of its interim reports," CVS told MT Newswires.

The company said it is making health care more affordable and accessible by working to cut the costs of prescriptions for the patients it serves.

UnitedHealth ( UNH ) and Cigna ( CI ) didn't immediately respond to MT Newswires' requests for comment.

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