Bill designed to head off pharmacy deserts in Ohio rolled out by lawmakers

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — "It’s just ridiculous and despicable that 10,000 people no longer have a pharmacy to go to, and 50 employees don’t have jobs. This is all over greed."

More than two months after Joe Craft was forced to close his pharmacies in Plain City and three other central Ohio locales in early February, he still grows emotional at the toll, especially on his former customers.

"It’s been really challenging for them. They’re all kind of scrambling to get their needs met.

"I had a lady reach out to me who we delivered to, who was in her 80s, let me know she had been coming to us all 25 years (his store was open in Plain City). She no longer drove. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do."

In a story Six On Your Side brought you first last month, Craft says his reimbursements as dictated by pharmacy benefit managers - powerful but obscure middlemen in the drug supply chain - weren’t enough to stay open.

With Craft’s experience being repeated across Ohio and the nation, a pair of GOP lawmakers are introducing a 10-page bill designed to increase pharmacy reimbursement and add transparency to a secretive setup.

Co-sponsor Tim Barhorst of northwest Ohio was transparent about his motives: "I felt compelled, instead of watching local and community pharmacists go out of business one at a time, two at a time, and today we talked with an owner who lost four at a time."

And during a statehouse news conference, the rookie legislator warned that if local pharmacies don’t get help, "we’ll end up having pharmacy deserts around Ohio. And not just in little rural Ohio. We’re going to have them in the cities as well and dribbling out to the suburbs."

He said pharmacy benefit managers perhaps should be dubbed "pharmacy bankruptcy managers."

The national trade group for PBMs blames the problem on drug manufacturers. Barhorst's not buying it.

The measure he and Stewart propose would require an itemized receipt for drug transactions that would document "every red cent" from the PBMs.

Ohio State clinical pharmacy professor Donald L. Sullivan said the current problem is easy to understand.

"When you look at what’s going on out there right now, it’s Economics 101. You have pharmacies that are dispensing a significant amount of their prescriptions below what it costs them to buy the drug," he said.

Co-sponsor Brian Stewart of Circleville said local pharmacies are invaluable.

"It’s important we have access in our communities to prescription drugs. And I think that we have seen over time that our community pharmacies – which are really kind of a hub for how people get health care in local communities, and especially in rural communities like I represent - they are being pushed out of business," he said.

"That’s going to force people to travel way out of the county to get drugs that, in many cases, they need daily to live."

Both sponsors expressed hope the bill would be accepted by a broad enough group of legislators that it would overcome the internal Republican infighting over the party's House leadership that has virtually ground the chamber to a halt.

Craft tells us the problem is growing:

"It’s all over social media. Every day, we find two or three stores have closed."

And he worries government officials are waiting too long to act.

"I think it would definitely help if it passed. I’m afraid it’s just going to be too little, too late. And I really don’t think Ohio or the rest of the country realize what they’re going to be losing and have lost."