Effects of CVS Aetna merger

[DrVader]

---

Members don't see this ad.

Pharmacy Is Dead
"The CVS/Aetna deal won’t kill traditional pharmacy—it just shows that it’s already dead."
"CVS added that pharmacy locations will be become much more than just pharmacies, but will "space for wellness" and include clinical and pharmacy services, vision, hearing, nutrition, beauty and medical equipment."

What do you guys think?

 

[PharFromNormal]

Pharmacy Is Dead
"The CVS/Aetna deal won’t kill traditional pharmacy—it just shows that it’s already dead."
"CVS added that pharmacy locations will be become much more than just pharmacies, but will "space for wellness" and include clinical and pharmacy services, vision, hearing, nutrition, beauty and medical equipment."

What do you guys think?

I think you could look at various parts of the healthcare system and see more and more blurred lines and divisions from “traditional” roles. I think CVS is essentially trying to build a mega health system. At their size buying a tiny health plan or a small physician group doesn’t really make sense. If they want to build that mega system I think they need a way to do it at scale.
I don’t think that pharmacy is dead. If they start removing pharmacy’s from some of their “boxes” I’d be very very surprised. Now we can have the arguement of what is “the pharmacy” ...is it 4 walls that divide the box from the parking lot or is it the area behind the counter where prescriptions are processed. I tend to think the latter not the former. There’s been a loud faction (I won’t say majority) that keep pushing to get pharmacists more involved in the healthcare team. If the “box” was the home to a bunch of those team members would that be closer to the vision? Idk.
That being said, if this deal goes through I think it could be a game changer on retail/community pharmacists/pharmacies doing some things that today maybe they could do but the system had no natural structure to perpuate due to the incentives being fragmented. There’s another thread on here regarding low rates of pharmacies providing birth control and some speculate (probably accurately) that there’s no reimbursement or they charge patients higher cash rates than their copay at a provider. In the future, what’s to stop Aetna-Caremark-CVS from covering that service and using established channels to let the money flow through the system? Imagine filling a bc script that you indicated you initiated and along with the rx reimbursement you got another $X or so from the patients health plan (Aetna) via caremark. Personally I think if they did that it would be pretty cool but I think if they did, no matter what “X” was, people would bitch about it (it’s always going to be too low and will always go down over time). One last point... if I’m CVS Health and I own aetna, and I believe too many meds or harmful meds can be very costly on patient outcomes I now have an internal incentive dilemma. Previously prescriptions made me money so I didn’t really have an incentive to invest in efforts to give those up unless I had to and I wasn’t really fully exposed to the cost of excess/meaningless meds... now if it’s an aetna patient that CVS is dispensing prescriptions for those prescriptions have a much different total company ROI equation. And this is where people will say they’ll just pass that cost onto the employer or govt. and maybe you’re right but they’ll have to compete with the Uniteds, Humanas, and Blues of the world

 

[WVUPharm2007]

Congratulations, liberals. We now have a single payer healthcare system.

 

[Han11]

.

 

[ldiot]

Rx margins are crap, CVS is looking for alternate revenue sources. It's why CVS re-branded itself as a healthcare company a long time ago