To the Editor:
Ask the pharmacist you’ve known for years how business is going, and you may be surprised by the answer. Across Louisiana, the independent drugstores that anchor small towns and city neighborhoods alike are struggling, and a big reason is a middleman most customers never see: the Pharmacy Benefit Manager.
PBMs decide how much a pharmacy gets reimbursed for filling your prescription, and increasingly they set that number below what the pharmacy paid for the drug itself. The same companies often steer patients toward the mail-order pharmacies they own. It’s a squeeze that has already shuttered hometown pharmacies and left some rural parishes with nowhere nearby to fill a prescription at all. The savings supposedly wrung out of the system aren’t showing up in your pocket, and they’re certainly not reaching your pharmacist.
Washington, meanwhile, is busy with Most Favored Nation pricing, a plan to peg our drug costs to what other countries pay. It would do nothing for the pharmacy down the street, because the problem isn’t what a drug lists for overseas. It’s what happens to the money once it enters our own system.
Congress is home for August, and an election is near. I’d ask Louisiana’s representatives to stand with the pharmacists their communities depend on: hold the middlemen accountable.
Shayne Benedetto
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