Explore every episode of the podcast Organized Money

In Part 1, we heard how pharmacists are trying to push back against the monopolistic and harmful practices of PBMs. Today, we hear from another avenger who is taking the battle against PBMs to his workplace on Capitol Hill. Representative Jake Auchicloss is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Pharmacists Fight Back Act, the most comprehensive PBM reform ever introduced at the federal level. He tells David and Matt that you've got to delink the money that a PBM earns to the price of a drug or the volume of drugs that are sold. And he's not willing to settle for less. 

What would you do if you owned an independent pharmacy and you discovered that the only way to actually make money would be to stop filling most prescriptions? This is what our guest Benjamin Jolley sees everyday. As a third generation independent pharmacist, he's watched as an industry of middlemen have taken control over a transaction that they literally have nothing to do with. Pharmacy Benefit Managers, PBMs decide which drugs, the pricing and the supply between patients trying to fill prescriptions and what a pharmacist gets paid. As a result, some 2000 plus pharmacies have closed this year. How did we get here? Matt and David go behind the pharmacy counter to break it all down with Benjamin Jolley. 

Today, just four companies—Walmart, Kroger, Costco and Albertsons—account for about half of all grocery sales in the country. And two of them, Kroger and Albertsons, want to merge. If approved, it would be the largest supermarket merger in history. Together they employ 700,000 people across some 5,000 stores. But regulators are fighting back, arguing that a merger would be bad for consumers and for workers.

In this episode we go inside the courtroom to hear the case for and against the merger with Laurel Kilgour, an attorney and the research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Google just lost the biggest tech antitrust court ruling since the 1990s. And now the fate of Google’s search preeminence is TBD. But the question we’re asking in this episode; What took so long? This trial could have happened 11 years ago, but didn’t. Why not? How did Google avoid the antitrust arm of the government for so long? How did the case against Google get squashed back in 2012 and who did the squashing? And exactly how many times a week were Google executives meeting with the Obama administration over its eight years in office? 

David and Matt speak with journalists, brothers and co-authors Luke and Brody Mullins. In their new book The Wolves of K Street, they unpack the public and private campaign Google and its cast of lobbyists and political friends waged to protect the company and the consequences of that delay for all of us.

On Organized Money, Matt Stoller & Dave Dayen break down the ways monopolies control the food we eat, the drugs we take, the way we communicate – and so much more. Coming October 15th.