By Amina Niasse

NEW YORK (Reuters) -CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group and Cigna 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 said the commissioners’ appearances at anti-pharmacy benefit manager events showed their prejudice.

Cigna’s 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 Caremark, UnitedHealth’s Optum, and Cigna’s 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 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)