Independent pharmacists from across Mississippi are pushing lawmakers this week to pass legislation that would better regulate the actions of pharmacy benefit managers – also known as PBMs – who they say are eroding their customer base through unethical practices.

Michael Jones, owner of Vicksburg’s Helping Hand Pharmacy, said the problem is years in the making. 

“The difficulties have been with the pharmacy benefit managers, the PBMs, as they know, and their obscure contracts,  their heavy-handedness on them as far as the reimbursement rates we’re getting, for whatever reason, their ability to get away with paying us below our acquisition costs,” Jones said. 

Jones said, should lawmakers not take action, independent pharmacies may be forced to close. 

John Storey, owner of Vicksburg’s Battlefield Drugs, pointed to the closure of People’s Drug Store on Washington Street in 2024 as a prime example of what can happen if lawmakers don’t make a move to intervene.

“People’s Drugstore went out of business. And they were the toughest garfish in the gar hole,” Storey said. “They’ve been around (through) world wars and the Great Depression and all these things. They always, through proper management and work ethic, seemed to be there. Well, this poor girl lost it all.”

Speaking to The Post in November, just prior to her store’s closure after 103 years in business, People’s Drug Store owner Wendy Trevilion said the math no longer added up for her operation.

“The majority of our clientele is low-income, Medicare and Medicaid, where their medicines are on Medicare Part D plans,” Trevilion said. “And these plans have been able to get away with making independent stores have contracts that are unreasonable. When we submit a claim for a 30-day supply of medication, we might get 15 cents, 87 cents. That’s not enough to cover the cost of filling a prescription. That barely even covers the cost of the actual pills.”

Independent pharmacists the state over are pointing to PBM practices like low payments, charging insurers more to inflate profits and pushing customers to specific pharmacies as practices the smaller, independent pharmacies can no longer endure. 

“But the PBMs are recording record profits quarter after quarter after quarter,” Storey said. “And they’ve got 10, 12 different methods that they earn a profit. Holding the manufacturer hostage for rebates, that’s one. Forcing you to mail order, that’s two. Specialty drugs, that’s a whole different world of expense.”

Both the Mississippi House of Representatives and the Senate have passed bills aimed at regulating PBMs. Both bills would prohibit practices such as charging a higher price to health plans for a drug than a pharmacy is paid and would give the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy more power to help curb the unfair practices.

Many independent pharmacies are backing the Senate’s SB2677 because of the additional protections.

“That’s the bill we would really like to see passed,” said Helping Hand pharmacist Matt Hendrix. “Now, initially, that bill had some pricing information in there that would help protect independent pharmacies. Currently, we get paid below cost on about 20% of our claims. And when I say below cost, I don’t mean below what we’re asking for the medication. I mean below what we pay for it.”

Legislation in the House and the Senate still have to pass out of committee and into the opposite chambers.

“We’ve had customers that have been with us since the day we opened the store, and we’ve had to turn some of those prescriptions away for those people for the last three or four years,” Hendrix said. “We filled a lot of those claims that were below cost, you know, because we could make it up in other areas. But it gets worse and worse every year, and we get paid less and less every year on those claims, and it’s gotten to the point where we can’t make it up. So we’ve had to turn some of those people away. And that’s a hard thing to do: to look a customer in the eye that’s been with you since the day you go through your doors and tell them, you know, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t file this to your insurance because, you know, we’re losing so much money on this claim.”

Ben Martin contributed reporting to this story.