By Andy Miller, KFF Health News (TNS)
CUTHBERT, Ga. — While customers at Adams Family Pharmacy picked up their prescriptions on a hot summer day, some stopped in for coffee, ice cream, homemade cake, or cookies.
It wasn’t a bake sale, but the sweets bring extra revenue as pharmacist and co-owner Nikki Bryant works to achieve profitability at her business on the town square.
Bryant said she is doing all she can to bolster it against a powerful force that threatens her and other independent pharmacists: the middlemen who manage virtually all prescriptions written in the U.S., called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Serving as brokers among drugmakers, pharmacies, and health insurers, these health care entities have drawn scrutiny from Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and state legislatures for their role in the increase in drug prices.
Bryant and other independent pharmacists say PBMs not only create higher costs but also make it harder for patients to access medications. So they were hopeful about state legislation this year that would have increased their reimbursement to match the average prices paid to retail chain pharmacies through the state employee health plan. But Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the bill.
Kemp cited a fiscal estimate that it would cost the state as much as $45 million a year and said “the General Assembly failed to fund this initiative.”
Underlining the Georgia legislative reform effort against pharmacy benefit managers was an analysis by the American Pharmacy Cooperative, which represents independent pharmacies, that reviewed the price differential paid to a north Georgia pharmacy and nearby chain stores.
The analysis early this year showed chains were paid well beyond the family business for many of the same medications: For example, the chains received an average of nearly $54 for the antidepressant bupropion, while Bell’s Family Pharmacy in Tate, Georgia, got $5.54, the analysis said. For a drug used to treat blood pressure,…
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