Republicans and Democrats In This State Agreed 100% On This Issue. Does CVS Care?
Recently, there was a rare 144-0, fully bipartisan, vote by legislators in Louisiana's House of Representatives. The vote was to ensure Louisiana's state employees' pharmacy benefit contract will have options for patients to access their local pharmacies and that pharmacists are paid above their costs of meds.
CVS Caremark is a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) that has merged with CVS retail and mail order pharmacies. They oversee not only their own reimbursements but also the reimbursements to their competitors' pharmacies.
Louisiana has legislation that does not allow the insurance companies' PBMs to force to their own retail and mail order pharmacies.
So, what does CVS/CVS Caremark do? CVS Caremark purposefully reimburses their competitor's pharmacies below their costs, as low as $0.00 to $0.10. CVS Caremark is a billion-dollar company whose middleman/pharmacy services, such as reimbursing pharmacies, have resulted in most of their profits. Yet, they refuse to reimburse their competitors' pharmacies above their costs.
After, legislators realized that CVS's reimbursement would essentially result in another type of pharmacy steering as pharmacies would close or be unable to afford to help these patients due to them losing money to service patients, so the legislators with a 144-0 vote refused to approve the CVS contract for the state employees.
Even with this pressure, CVS wouldn't come to the table to negotiate the contract after legislators realized that CVS would be causing harm to their constituents and patients.
CVS will most likely challenge the legislators' decision in court instead of negotiating with them.
This is a bold statement of how much power these corporations have. Alarming.
Also, this week physicians noted that CVS is hiring for positions for "PBM Reputation & Issues Management."
I would argue that these positions wouldn't be needed if they did the right thing in the first place.
Thank you for your support and for the legislators and the people in Louisiana for standing up for the people and America's public health.
Imagine if we could have that bipartisan support at a national level for such a critical life-saving issue.
Loretta Boesing
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