March 4th, 2010
Reports the Standard-Speaker:
People insured by Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania face a choice of whether to fill prescriptions at a pharmacy or through the mail.
Starting May 1, Blue Cross makes mail orders the preferred choice for customers in group plans. Blue Cross will allow customers to buy maintenance drugs from pharmacies for two months. In the third month, Blue Cross will block sales unless customers indicate that they choose to keep using a store rather than mail order.
“How do we lose these choices? We’re in America. We should have choices,” Joseph Lauricella, owner of the Medicine Shoppe in Hazleton, said.
Across America, however, people are receiving incentives to choose mail rather than stores like Lauricella owns. A typical offer allows customers to buy three months’ worth of medicine through the mail for the price they would pay for two months’ worth at a store.
Those drugs are supplied through mail-order pharmacies owned by companies that manage pharmacy benefits for the insurers and negotiate prices with the drug makers.
For its pharmacy benefit manager, Blue Cross uses Express Scripts, a Fortune 500 company based in St. Louis.
Prior to May 1, Blue Cross customers could sign up to purchase medications from the mail-order pharmacy of Express Scripts, but now they will be enrolled in the mail-order plan unless they opt out.
May 13th, 2010 at 9:59 am
The article on Blue Cross of NEPA needs clarification. Only about 80k of the 580k Blue Cross NEPA customers are affected by this, and it really isn’t clear what is going on. My wife and me, for example, have not received notices to choose mail v pharmacy for our prescriptions. So clarification of this new policy is needed.