Have you heard the news?  CVS bought Target’s pharmacy business.  I don’t know how this will all work out, but generally I view mergers suspiciously.  Whenever that happens there will undoubtedly be all sorts of mailings about what a great deal it’s going to be for you and me, and undoubtedly what you and I will get out of the deal is an uncomfortable economic butt screwing somewhere down the road.  Less competition almost always equates to higher consumer prices.  Target got out of the pharmacy business because they were losing a shit load of money dabbling in it.   Reimbursement rates for pharmacies get whittled down by pharmacy benefit managers (pharmacy/insurance company negotiators) with each passing insurance contract renewal.  And drug formularies likewise get more restrictive.

It won’t be long before CVS, Walgreens and Walmart are all that remain in the way of competition.  It’s inevitable.  You need a lot of pennies to buy stuff for your company and pay your employees.  Since insurance contracts allow pharmacies to collect only pennies for their drugs dispensed, it only makes sense that bigger companies swallow up smaller ones so they can acquire more pennies.  Gotta pay the bills.

Pharmacy Benefit Manager hard at work figuring out how many pennies your insurance company should pay your pharmacy

Of course now that I am retired I couldn’t care less about any of this.  The fact is, I barely gave a shit about it the last few years I was employed.  I wound my working life down managing one of Target’s pharmacies for 13 years, and it was about year three working there that I gave up caring about reimbursements.  That is because by that time I had sent over two dozen emails to Target pharmacy operations about huge losses our pharmacy was taking, and every time the reply I received was one that basically stated I was not to worry about it.  So I finally decided I wouldn’t.  Instead of worrying about negative insurance reimbursements, Target preferred I worry about what their people in high places flushed into their unrelenting shit stream of corporate busywork that flowed down-river to their pharmacies.  Target assured me they had people at headquarters taking care of insurances losses.  Turns out maybe Target should have been doing a better job supervising whoever those people were, but CVS is probably glad they didn’t.

This is all pretty boring material to the average blog reader, I realize.  Sorry.  The topic is just one that I have to harp about as a way of journaling more than anything else.  Believe me I can come up with a lot more cool stuff to complain about than this shit.  By way of making all this more interesting for you, keep track of your prescription co-pays for the next two or three  years.  Let’s just see if by then my prediction of a bigger dent in your wallet isn’t correct.  I bet it will be.  And another thing you might want to track is service.  Target pharmacies score consistently high marks on customer service surveys, while CVS scores are consistently low.  One way CVS is able to get more bang for their pennies is to cut back on help.   Just another fact of trying to scrape by with fewer pennies.