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As retail pharmacies have struggled with staffing shortages, pharmacy workers across the U.S. have been sounding the alarm about dangerous working conditions, pushed by quotas and other metrics...Walgreens will no longer evaluate its pharmacy staffers based on speed and other metrics amid complaints from pharmacists across the industry that pressure to meet targets like the number of filled prescriptions is leading to dangerous mistakes and staff burnout...Walgreens, the country’s second-largest pharmacy chain, announced...that it is eliminating “task-based metrics” from performance evaluations to allow its pharmacy staffers to “place even greater focus on patient care.” They will now be evaluated “solely on the behaviors that best support patient care and enhance the patient experience,”...READ MORE

The program provides roughly 700 monthly patients with vital medications they otherwise could not afford at no cost...The shelves stay stocked at the St. Vincent de Paul Charitable Pharmacy. As Southwest Ohio's only free pharmacy, there's no shortage of medication — and no shortage of people who need it...Opened in 2006 after local organization Leadership Cincincinnati advocated for a law change to allow for charitable pharmacies in the state of Ohio, the pharmacy now has a main facility at the Don & Phyllis Neyer Outreach Center and a second at the Western Hills Thrift Store...READ MORE

When I served as a White House health advisor, I invited a group of large employers to describe the challenges company health plans faced. The top complaint? An obscure type of middleman that’s part of every health plan -- the Pharmacy Benefit Manager. The PBM industry, with only three giant companies controlling almost 80 percent of the market, offers a seemingly simple value proposition: if you’re an employer or an insurance carrier serving individuals or businesses, hire the PBM to help you get volume discounts on prescription drug makers...Sounds great! But, what if these middlemen pocketed much of the savings instead of passing them on to employers?...READ MORE

A federal court recently exposed the rot at the heart of America's healthcare system...The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, partly revolved around the many low-income, and even middle-income, patients who receive "co-pay coupons" from drug manufacturers to help them cover their out-of-pocket costs at pharmacies...For many Americans, these coupons represent the difference between filling a prescription and going without lifesaving care. But in recent years, health insurers have started to effectively steal those coupons, leaving patients on the hook for far higher expenses. As Judge Carl Nichols noted in a May ruling, insurance companies "pocket for themselves at least some of the assistance."...Sadly, the practice is totally legal. And until lawmakers crack down on this sort of grossly immoral behavior, insurance behemoths and their allies will continue shifting costs onto patients, with disastrous consequences for individuals' health and society at large...READ MORE

CVS reported a quarterly loss of more than $3 billion to cover its share of a global opioid settlement, but its third-quarter earnings blew past Wall Street estimates...The pharmacy retail giant said that it had a $5.2 billion charge in the third quarter for a settlement relating to its role in the opioid crisis. The settlement resolves "substantially all opioid lawsuits and claims filed by other states, political subdivisions and tribes against the company to be paid over 10 years, beginning in 2023...READ MORE

Who decides how much you pay for prescription medicines? It's a question with a very complicated answer. Now, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is hoping to simplify the process and save you money by opening his own pharmacy...Cuban helped launch Cost Plus Drugs in January. It's an online pharmacy with no storefronts that offers more than 1,000 generic drugs. The business model is built on transparency. Each drug profile breaks down how Cost Plus determines its price: cost plus a 15% markup, $3 pharmacy fee, and $5 for shipping..."We get people coming to us and saying 'your price is $10, my co-pay is $20,'" said Cuban. "'So I'm ignoring my insurance and coming straight to you.'"...Cost Plus does it by negotiating directly with drug manufacturers and cutting out the middleman...READ MORE

Getting diagnosed with cancer or another life-altering illness can overwhelm patients, who suddenly face a complex condition while worrying about their future, family and finances. The ability to quickly access prescribed specialty medicines shouldn’t add to those worries...There’s a far more efficient way to handle this, both for patients and doctors: provide the prescribed medications at the cancer clinic or academic medical center where the patient regularly goes for testing and medical appointments. Embedding a specialty pharmacy within the practice—called medically integrated dispensing dramatically improves the healthcare experience by removing the PBM-controlled specialty pharmacy from the “triangle of care”—the doctor, the patient, and the pharmacist...READ MORE

EmpiRx Health saw a significant increase in pharmacy claims for behavioral health therapies but found managing these treatments in a value-based approach can mitigate the costs...The pharmacy benefit manager saw claims for behavioral health treatments grow 9.4% between 2020 and 2021...Utilization of antidepressant medications grew by 12% year over year, and use of treatments for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder increased by 20.2%...However, per claim spend for antidepressants declined by 1.8% between 2020 and 2021, and per claim spend for ADHD drugs decreased by 9.1%...“We published this data to shed light on this mental health tsunami as well as to demonstrate the successful outcomes of a financially aligned healthcare model," EmpiRx CEO Karthik Ganesh said...READ MORE

Local pharmacies are welcoming the news they will soon be able to refill some prescriptions for customers who don’t have a family doctor...But they agree with doctors who have said the change is not a long-term solution to the shortage of physicians...Overall, however, it is really needed right now, said Moez Karim, pharmacy manager, at The Pharmacy in Langley...“A lot of patients, especially in this area, they’re either seniors or they have real difficulty getting access to doctors and their family doctors. Often times, they are seeing them on the phone. I think they’re falling through the cracks. This is one way of reducing their stress.”...Minister of Health Adrian Dix announced last week that, starting Oct. 14, pharmacists across B.C. will be able to renew prescriptions for a wider range of medications so that people in B.C. can access medication “in a timely fashion and ensure continuity of their treatment.”...READ MORE

...Republican and Democratic senators met with the chamber's parliamentarian to discuss whether the bill's proposal for Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with manufacturers has a direct impact on government spending or tax revenue, as reconciliation rules require...But these are not negotiations. They're price controls. The bill's text sets maximum prices that the government will pay — and threatens confiscatory taxes for drug companies that refuse to comply...it will mean that fewer cutting-edge drugs are available to American patients...price controls on prescription drugs are unnecessary. Even as the price of just about everything else in our economy has soared in the past year, drug prices have been relatively flat...If lawmakers want to reduce patient drug costs meaningfully, they should train their focus on pharmacy benefit managers...PBMs keep a cut of the savings they extract and send another cut to the insurer, which may use that cut to lower overall premiums...READ MORE