Pharmacy chain says it will add health services to other locations, book roughly $1 billion restructuring charge   CVS Health Corp. said Thursday it will close 900 stores over the next three years, nearly 10% of its U.S. locations, while adding more health services at remaining locations. The largest U.S. pharmacy chain said it would close 300 stores a year while adding primary-care offices at certain sites as well as converting more stores into so-called health hubs with offerings such as diagnostic testing, mental-health services and hearing exams. “The company has been evaluating changes in population, consumer buying patterns and future health needs to ensure it has the right kinds of stores in the right locations for consumers and for the business,” [...]

A federal appeals court has largely upheld a North Dakota law imposing various requirements on pharmacy benefit managers, including a ban on holding ownership interests in patient assistance programs or mail-order specialty pharmacies. A unanimous panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that most of the law did not conflict with the federal law governing employee benefits plans, reversing its own earlier holding. It struck down some parts of the law, limiting fees charged by PBMs to pharmacies, on the grounds that they conflicted with the federal Medicare statute. Lawyers for North Dakota and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA), the national PBM association that challenged the law, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. PBMs serve [...]

Efforts to administer vaccinations are expected to be fully up and running next week Pediatricians are preparing to administer the nation’s first coronavirus children’s vaccine as early as Wednesday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off Tuesday night on giving the Pfizer-BioNTech shots to millions of kids ages 5 to 11. The go-ahead from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is a watershed moment in the fight against the pandemic, which has killed 745,000 people in the United States and sickened nearly 2 million kids. Millions of families have waited for a children’s vaccine since the first adult shot was authorized last December, hoping their kids could finally resume in-person schooling and extracurricular activities without interruption — and that their own work schedules could become more predictable. Walensky’s recommendation [...]

When Sarah Tuttle visited a Rite Aid with her 7- and 14-year-old children this month, she figured they’d be able to get walk-in flu shots, as they always have. Not this time. She could tell by the pharmacy worker's expression. “She looked at me with this totally harried face and said, ‘We’re not doing walk-ins,’” Tuttle said of the employee she encountered in Seattle. “People peeled out of the line. It was clearly not just us.” © BRYAN R. SMITH, AFP via Getty Images Drugstores advertise free flu shots Aug. 19, 2020, in New York. This year, an appointment may be required. Tuttle and others are running into an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: walk-ins turned away because of staff shortages at [...]

Centene, the nation’s largest Medicaid managed-care company, is planning to stop its work as a pharmacy middleman, or pharmacy benefit manager. Executives last week said the company is issuing a $30 billion request for proposals from an outside contractor to take over the work. The news comes after Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued the company in March, accusing it of working through its Ohio managed-care organization to layer pharmacy middlemen atop one another and then overbilling taxpayers by tens of millions of dollars. Centene didn’t admit wrongdoing, but it agreed to pay Ohio $88 million and it set aside $1 billion to settle with states that seemed likely to follow Yost’s lead and sue the company. Centene didn’t respond to a request [...]