Dr. Kurt Oettel:
It was my intention here today to read this script, which you all have in front of you, but I think it would probably be more helpful if you actually heard — what does this actually look like in person? One of the things I'd like to speak to is the formularies. So, I'm a cancer doctor.

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My ability to give the right medication at the right time is not dictated by what I want to do. It's dictated by a PBM formulary.

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I had a patient a year ago who I started on what I thought was gonna be the most effective, best tolerated treatment — lasted for about six months before his plan changed him to a medication that requires him to take a pill four times a day with steroids. He's a brittle diabetic. No surprise, two months later he's in our ICU with renal failure and DKA. I don't get to choose this. Somebody else chooses this for me. And when pharmacy benefit managers say they're lowering the cost of drugs, yeah, they are, but they're raising the cost of hospital admissions. They're raising the cost of non-compliance. This doesn't work for patients and this doesn't work for patients day in and day out. The examples I give are not one off. We all have many examples of this. I feel like sometimes patients are widgets in a system of which they're just dictated what treatment they're going to get, and I'm complicit in giving many of these medications that I know are inferior treatments.