SCAN Group CEO on prescription price gouging: ‘The reality is all of us are culpable’ in the industry

SCAN Group and Health Plan CEO, Dr. Sachin Jain discusses health care costs at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit.

Video Transcript

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Talk to me about the blame game because I know that's something you've also talked a lot about. And we know that right now, especially with what we saw with the Inflation Reduction Act, and just generally, largely speaking, a lot to do with how healthcare functions. Tell me about this blame game of clinical providers blaming insurers, blaming the drug companies, blaming PBMs, everyone points a finger at being the reason why healthcare costs are so high. How do we fix that?

SACHIN JAIN: I think it's what you said is exactly right, Anjalee. I think it starts with actually taking a hard look at ourselves and looking at the ways in which we're making things more challenging for patients. It is very easy to point at drug companies and say that they're gouging patients. It's easy to look at hospitals and saying they're engaging in predatory practices. It's easy to say that about physicians. It's easy to say that about insurance companies.

But the reality is, is that I think all of us are culpable in creating the healthcare system that we have. And to your point about my background, I've sat in all these seats across the healthcare industry, across all these verticals. And the common observation is that we're not necessarily doing enough from the seat that we're in and the moment in time that we're in it. And instead, we spend a lot of effort trying to blame others for why things are dysfunctional or broken for patients.

And I think there needs to be, to my previous comments, more leadership and more honest reflection about who we are, where we are, and what we're doing wrong. You saw a number of "New York Times" exposes over the last couple of weeks about the health insurance industry, about the hospital community, and some of the predatory practices related to billing, related to coding.

And we have to clean up our act. None of us is blame-free in this environment of ever increasing healthcare costs. You just had Al Bourla on talking about increasing the prices of vaccines, as well as drugs. We have to take a hard look at what companies are doing, why they're doing it, and holding them accountable, both in the public forum in the media, as well as in the pages of-- as well as through regulatory processes to ensure that patients are protected because what I see, time and time again, is, a lot of rhetoric that doesn't necessarily match the action of healthcare organizations.

And what we need more than ever right now is authentic leadership that's committed to doing the right thing. And I think what we see, more often than not, is organizations that should be more mission oriented, hiding behind the rhetoric of no margin, no mission, which is a nice statement to make. It makes us feel better about some of the profit seeking, rent seeking behaviors that we observe in healthcare, but ultimately ignores the fact that the mission isn't organizational sustainability.

The mission is serving the community and keeping people healthier. And again, I think we've gotten confused over the last number of decades. And healthcare has evolved into this new normal where every sector of healthcare is trying to extract as much as it can. And it's, frankly, unsustainable, and it's unethical.