Reporter: Glenn Evans gevans@weatherforddemocrat.com
A Weatherford pharmacist joined members of Congress
and her peers from six states in Washington on Friday to raise support for a bill
to rein in the pricing power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers.
“Our country is facing an epidemic of pharmacy closures,” Brandi Chane, owner
of Davis City Pharmacy on the courthouse square, said at a press conference
below the Capitol dome.
She and the others were there to raise support for House Resolution 9096, also
known as the Pharmacists Fight Back Act.
Introduced by U.S. Reps. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., and Diana Harshbarger, R-
Tenn., the bipartisan measure addresses a range of problems Chane and her
peers lay at the feet of Pharmacy Benefit Managers.
PBMs can be described as a middle-man working in tandem with insurers to
establish what drugs are available — and what the insurance companies pay
drug makers.
They were set up to negotiate prescription drug costs with drug makers. But the
rebates and discounts they achieve don’t reach drug store counters or patients
picking up prescriptions.
And since the PBMs control insurance company reimbursements, pharmacists
often face the choice of signing onto money-losing contracts with insurers or
the untenable path of being unable to provide drugs to patients.
Chane, on Friday, gave her personal testimony of her own mother, a military
spouse on Tri-Care insurance, who works at Davis Pharmacy but can’t get her
prescriptions there because the contract her daughter faces is not sustainable.
“Millions of patients just like my mom will be impacted by the continued
closure of the independent pharmacies without the passage of HR 9096,” she
said. “Have our military service members and their families not given enough
to their country?”... Continue Reading
Way to go Brandi! We are proud of you!