Why the FTC formed a new healthcare task force

Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), directed the agency’s staff to form a new task force focused solely on the healthcare industry, according to a March 20 memo.

“The underlying purpose of the task force is, one, to promote information sharing, and then two, to really take tangible, concrete steps to advance these goals of making healthcare more affordable,” an official from the consumer protection bureau told Healthcare Brew.

The task force will consist of representatives from the FTC’s Bureaus of Competition, Consumer Protection, and Economics, Office of Policy Planning, and Office of Technology. It plans to later expand to include members of the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Justice, according to the agency’s press release.

“The issues in this space are incredibly complex and really require solutions and thinking that isn’t isolated in one division of the FTC,” the official from the consumer protection bureau said.

“This is an area where the task force model can be particularly useful, both in leveraging resources and expertise across different parts of the FTC and the federal government,” an official from the bureau of competition said.

The objectives. The official from the Bureau of Consumer Protection pointed to the recent Express Scripts consent order as an example of the kind of action the task force would like to take.

In February, the FTC reached a settlement with the Big 3 pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) over a lawsuit the agency filed in late 2024 alleging Express Scripts, along with CVS Caremark and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx, the other two Big 3 PBMs, artificially inflated insulin costs through anticompetitive practices.

The settlement requires Express Scripts to stop preferring more expensive drugs on its standard formularies and ensure patients’ out-of-pocket costs are based on a drug’s net cost instead of an artificially inflated price, among a handful of other actions.

It “showed the value of a coordinated approach and information sharing across the FTC on these really complicated issues,” the consumer protection bureau official told Healthcare Brew.

When asked what healthcare companies could expect from the task force, the FTC official from the Bureau of Competition said “to the extent that businesses or their lawyers think they can game the system or evade scrutiny by playing the agencies off of each other or playing different parts of the federal government off of each other, that is not an effective approach,” and that federal agencies are “working in a collaborative way to make sure that that does not happen.”

An outside view. Douglas Ross, a University of Washington law professor who specializes in antitrust and class action litigation, told Healthcare Brew the task force “is a great idea,” but it’s nothing new.

“The basic notion that healthcare is an important industry, and that if you have a group of people in the government who are investigating different aspects of the healthcare industry and having them share information, makes good sense. That seems obvious,” Ross said. “But things like this have been done before, and they’ll be done again.”