Pharmacy. Jim Plagakis. Pharmacist

My kinda guy.  A Texan who has a good reason why 30 pharmacies have gone under in the last 6 months.  I live in Texas, right now.  The biggest (Alaska is) the baddest, the testosteroness, the biggest titness.  The biggest cock substitutes (the monster pick up truck that never has had a dirty tire).  Texas has the most uninsured.  Texas is run by good-old-boys and the people buy it and elect idiots who are out to feather the nests of the already-rich.  Texas looks the other way when people are in need.

Pharmacists go under?  Coincidental that PBMs are in the game?  Fuck no.  Our friend who sent this was one of the smart ones.  He will do fine as an independent in a rural area.  Lots of rural in this country.  Think about it.

This is serious shit.  If the only retail pharmacies we have are chains, big box or grocery stores, we are done.

Subject: TX managed care Medicaid and Tom Suehs could use some investigating if you ask me…
To: <jpgakis@hotmail.com>

Hello Jim,

I began reading your fantastic columns in Drug topics back as a wet behind the ears newly licensed Pharmacist in 2003. I was working for Albertsons back then and left to go to Prime Therapeutics mail order operation in Irving for 2 years (04-06) then I worked for the PBM Wellpoint from 2006-6/2010 processing prior authorizations until we were bought out by Express Scripts who promptly closed down our Plano office. (It was a neat gig too, I worked from home)

While I was working for Wellpoint, I also did Prn work around the state of TX for Rx solutions and I found myslef working at independent Pharmacies and thought to myself that one day I’d like to be an owner too. In 2009 I signed on with a broker and when I got my walking papers from ESI in Jan of 2010 (literally a day after my birthday), I decided to get serious with my broker and then acquired a small independent pharmacy in rural west Texas. I have learned more in 2 years of ownership than I’d ever imagined and I continue to learn and be surprised by my findings (like the fact that Republicans are in fact not small business friendly like I had believed previously)

Now onto the managed care debacle in Texas. Roughly 30 Pharmacies have closed since it’s implementation in March of 2012. The state was divided up into separate regions that each insurance company could bid on for that business each with their own rates of Pharmacy reimbursement http://txvendordrug.com/downloads/service_area.pdf

Here are some links with summaries of the negative effects that selling out our state run system to for profit PBMs has had on our delivery of local Pharmacy services to, by definition, our most needy patients………

http://m.thevindicator.com/mobile/opinion/article_156b0280-bca3-11e1-a552-001a4bcf887a.html

http://www.themonitor.com/articles/hard-59145-pharmacies-program.html

http://texastruecare.com/newletter/04-19-12/index.html

“Since the March 1st transition to pharmacy managed care, there have been several accounts of financial hardship suffered by Texas pharmacies, including store closures due to the drastic reductions in reimbursements. During his presentation to the committee, Commissioner Suehs addressed the matter of pharmacy closings relating to the pharmacy managed care rollout.

“There have been a lot of stories around closures of pharmacies around the state,” said Mr. Suehs. He also stated that, according to a newspaper article obtained by HHSC, there had been reports of 26 pharmacy closures, but that the number was misleading. HHSC has claimed that most of the closures are unrelated to managed care and that in instances of pharmacies being forced to sell, it is market driven.

“I am really cautious about pharmacies blaming the Medicaid reimbursement, and we want to analyze and see if that is accurate. In most cases I believe that it is a market driven situation taking place right now,” Suehs said. Pharmacists, however, are reporting a much different account of what is taking place. ”