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By David Pinto, founder of Racher Press
Seems like every time chain drug retailing gets involved with the larger outside world, the industry suffers — sometimes unfairly.
The most recent example is the brouhaha surrounding the controversy over PBMs, more commonly known as pharmacy benefit managers. For those who have not yet studied up on the subject, PBMs are the most recent effort to charge (overcharge?) the patient for purchasing prescription drugs. In their purest form, PBMs are designed to put a value (cost) on allowing the patient access to sometimes life-saving medication.
The unintended (inevitable?) consequence has been to increase the cost of prescription drugs in America — already the world’s highest — to unacceptable figures. Beyond that obvious conclusion, inevitable questions emerge. The most obvious one: Why should the United States lead the world in the prices it charges patients for a product that some prescription drug advocates believe should be free of charge?
That’s a perfectly logical question. The larger and more pertinent question is this one: Why does the United States too often find itself on the wrong side of an issue — especially when that issue involves economics. Indeed, stories abound of lower-class Americans being forced to choose between breakfast and life-saving medication, when economics determine that he or she doesn’t have enough money for both.
So far, this discussion has remained on logical ground. Why, indeed, should a person — any person, regardless of economic circumstances — be forced by economic circumstances not necessarily of his or her own making to forgo an opportunity to gain access to a drug that could or would save his or her life?
A fair question? Sure — so far. But now the national media and the federal government have each entered the contest, with both parties shouting fraud and threatening action. “Stop the steal” has become the favorite rallying cry of the moment.
Questions abound. The most pressing one is this: Is this what the America of the 21st century has become? More to the point: Is retail pharmacy, traditionally one of the “good guys,” to again be put against the wall and executed following the asinine charge of cheating the customer?
Are there villains in this piece, villains who have rightly earned the enmity of the government, the media, the American people? Sure. Aren’t there always. But in our rush to judgment, let’s not too quickly put the neighborhood drug store behind bars.
Last we looked, this was a nation of laws, of (somewhat) rational thinkers, of solutions to those problems which periodically crop up to harass a nation and attempt to block progress.
We need to find that nation again. Now.
