Global health services company providing medical, pharmacy, and behavioral health insurance plans.Yahoo Finance ↗cigna.com ↗
1 take · first discussed May 17, 2025
Every call, plotted at the price the day they made it.
The only host view on record comes from Friedberg, who holds a medium-conviction bearish stance on Cigna's Express Scripts business. He argues that the three major PBMs — Express Scripts among them — extract roughly $3 in operating profit per prescription claim through opaque markups, generating billions in what he characterizes as excess profit. Friedberg sees meaningful regulatory and political risk to this middleman model, pointing to active FTC investigations as a catalyst that could threaten the core economics of PBM intermediaries. With only one host's thesis available, no cross-host agreement or disagreement can be assessed.
Friedberg argues PBMs like Express Scripts generate billions in excess profit through opaque markups and are subject to FTC investigations, with regulatory and political risk threatening the middleman model.
There's 3 major PBMs: CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx. These 3 companies make on average approximately $3 in operating profit per prescription claim processed. They make money in markups. The FTC has been investigating them.”1:34:53