The Rebate Kings!
To those who are concerned,
I’m a pharmacist that is giving pharmaceutical companies 2 hours at least in an 8 hour day, inputting the BIN #, group, id, and asking if they have activated the coupon first. This with my semi-high volume setting we process 20 coupons easily per day. In the end, who is it benefiting? My company, the PBM or the Drug company? These plastic cards have taken over my business.
PBMs once were for small claims processing, now they are involved in 70% of all Rx’s and up to 95% of all drug coverage plans. PBM’s set the parameters for physician prescribing, the tiered co-payments, rebates, etc.
In summary they control the usage of Rx drugs through incentives. They are Rebate kings.
My congress, my state reps and senators, my state board, all seem defenseless against these sleazy operators. They are are running all over us with no opposition.
I want to involve my local association… please send them your thoughts, by replying to this post.
I would like to put in names so that they might come out and start the fight and stop accepting
these time consuming headaches. Even sites like www.yourrxdiscounts.com where you can print out your coupon for drug from Abilify to Norco to Replax to Zoloft.
How can someone with an Rx for Solodyn 90mg pay $650 and then someone with a plastic card
get the same amount for $25?
…To be continued
Royd M.
Tags: blog, CAPA Blog, Pharmacist, Rebates, Royd, Rx Coupons
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
I can definitely understand your frustration Royd, but what about the patients. If a drug company wants to give them a discount to see if the drug fits their treatment plan, does that not make sense?
Comment by Marcus — March 22, 2010 @ 11:55 pm
yes it does help the patient after the
bin,group, id, etc are entered in the insurance field under their regular insurance… my solution is for the drug companies to make these discount cards a DEBIT card to be used at POS..point of sale…yea..no inputting, no time wasted, no activation…
Comment by Royd — March 23, 2010 @ 10:36 am
I am old enough to remember when 3rd party payments started and the promise of easy STANDARDIZED submissions were going to be the norm.. Well i am glad i did not hold my breath. I have to keep a cheat sheet to help complete the 3rd party fills for most plans i deal w/ on a daily basis. Now we have another sheet just for the Coupon cards.. we all can remmember the Tussionex coupon that was missprinted. These coupons are a pain but in the same breathe i am happy when i can use one to drop a copay for the drug and get a smile from the patient. Yep it is a pain to do the extra work, i am glad my boss lets me have the support staff to provide the service.
In a perfect world a debit card or direct payment checks would serve us better and still do what the drug company wants.
Better yet throw out the Medicare D plan and restart the deal with no donut hole and allow the goverment to negotiate the prices. it would be easy to adopt the Veterans Administration drug management plan the pits the Mfg against each other to lower prices..
my two cents.. please use the attached discount coupon to submit to your 3rd party carrier to reimburse my fee and pay u $1 for the $12 employee costs.
Comment by Tom schnorr — April 3, 2010 @ 10:15 am
can someone else comment… how many of these plastic cards does your pharmacy do a day… ?
Is there someone that would like to help me with a resolution at the upcoming TPA convention>?
come on.. get stirred up.. this type of abuse is what has always killed pharmacy… cause they..(insurance companies, governments, boards etc) pharmacist don’t act or comment or voice ..nothing.. so we have been ‘road kill’ for a long, long time…
Comment by royd — April 6, 2010 @ 8:40 pm
I quite understand the pain of having to enter a BIN #, ID, & Group # for a card that is not quite an insurance card. I unfortunately have to do it on a regular basis and have to say that it is a time consuming process. I do enjoy seeing the customer save money at the end of the process and understand why the drug companies would not make these “coupons” usable the the point of sale (although I would like for them to). We all know there is no free lunch….that being said, I am guessing that the drug companies use insurance card/drug coupons for the following reasons.
Reason #1: The drug company(that the customer is now asking for a discount from), has to the right to demand/access all kinds of information from the customer–information that the customer would NEVER have called in and provided the drug company if he/she was not forced to. This information can be used for marketing, data-mining etc. etc.
Reason #2: It gives the drug companies a whole lot of information about the pharmacies that the customers are using these “coupons” a. This information can be used for a variety of marketing purposes. For example, the drug company would know which zip codes to work on, send their sales reps. to etc. etc. Better yet, this data (that the customer and pharmacies are forced to provide) is being streamed in real-time straight to some marketing executives laptop.
So in conclusion….I absolutely do not agree with the process but see no way around it (at least in the short-term). Like I said earlier, there is no free lunch. For the customers to get a discount, they (and us pharmacies) have to pay for it in another fashion…..by giving up information about themselves (and us pharmacies). And in this information age, good information can be easily be turned green $$
Royd, I am on your side. If you can effect a change in legislation that would keep us from being forced to accept these time consuming headaches that would just be wonderful!!
Comment by Sonia — April 14, 2010 @ 9:17 am