Blue Shield of California has announced its intentions to stop using most of CVS Health's PBM services by early 2025 and open their doors to others including Amazon.com’s struggling pharmacy dispensing service and entrepreneur Mark Cuban's firm Cost Plus Drugs. As reported by Reuters, “The regional health insurance provider will still retain CVS Caremark for managing specialty drugs, costly medications used to treat complex conditions like cancer and rheumatoid arthritis,” and in the move, Blue Shield anticipates saving $500 million annually in drug costs. Blue Shield serves nearly 5 million Americans. “This is a huge development for our industry. It disintermediates a mega-PBM but unfortunately, it could be a model relying on mail order pharmacy from Amazon for generics and mail order specialty prescriptions from CVS-Aetna,” says NCPA’s CEO Douglas Hoey. "Changing the pharmacy payment model is a focus of NCPA but new models must be based on pharmacist access and improving patient care. A mail order-centric approach fails on both counts.” Stay tuned to qAM for more on this and other developments that will impact the future of pharmacy.
NCPA
