NCPA CEO Douglas Hoey will be in attendance on May 17 along with pharmacists, patients, caregivers, and physicians who are expected to protest patient steering at the headquarters of Cigna's Express Scripts (ESI) in St. Louis. The event is being organized by Loretta Boesing, founder of Unite for Safe Medications. Patient steering, protest organizers say, might be a lucrative business strategy for vertically integrated PBMs, but it ultimately offers no benefits to patients who get lost in the shuffle when their prescriptions are transferred to other pharmacies—often without their knowledge. Patient steering, say most community pharmacists, also equates to lost business for them, giving PBMs another unfair advantage in their war of attrition against independent businesses. NCPA has been fighting back for years. Just last month, NCPA pushed ESI to revise contract terms to align with its obligation to offer “reasonable and relevant” terms and conditions for participation in a Medicare Part D pharmacy network, and to revise its “bonus pool fee” to align with federal policy and, in January, NCPA applauded a major class action lawsuit alleging that ESI colluded with other PBMs to rig reimbursement rates.
NCPA
