Good Shepherd Health seems to reduce prescription costs

Pharmacist Philip Baker launched the doors of Good Shepherd Health more than a year ago to offer free or at-cost prescriptions to uninsured people in the region of Memphis. Baker rapidly discovered that individuals covered by Medicare required the services of the nonprofit pharmacy. He founded that even individuals with insurance too often could not afford the high cost of drugs or prescription costs.

Now, he has set his sights on advancing the way self-insured employers pay for medicines of their employees. Good Shepherd plans to give its at-cost model for prescriptions to chop the drug costs of employers, competing with for-profit pharmacy benefit managers like Express Scripts Inc.

“I’ve a vision to entirely revolutionize the whole industry and that is by making PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, obsolete,” Baker stated.

According to Baker, employers are paying the complete price for prescription costs and the mark-up on those drugs can be breathtaking.

Plavix, a drug utilized to stop blood clots and one of the most usually used, is his favorite instance.

Huge drug companies get a worse rap, and they should, for pricing brand-name drugs too high, he stated. Although, the major majority of drugs on the market are generic and he claimed for-profit pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers are marking those up.

By eliminating the profit and giving its medication management service for employers for a fee, Baker stated “merely initial numbers we are looking at we can decrease the company’s drug costs by thirty or forty percent right off the top.”

Good Shepherd has not sold the idea yet, but is in talks with various companies, stated Baker, 40, a University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Pharmacy graduate and former rehabilitation hospital director of pharmacy.

With a half dozen workers and headquartered in the Hickory Ridge Towne Center mall, Good Shepherd has offer $1.3 million worth of free medicines and served over 1,000 since opening in the year of September 2015, Baker claimed.

Despite nationwide attempts to assist uninsured individuals with the prescription costs drugs, charity pharmacies like Good Shepherd have sprung up to help meet the requirement in the last decade, stated Chris Palombo, chief executive of Dispensary of Hope in Nashville.

Dispensary of Hope is basically a nonprofit drug distributor that gets donated drugs from manufacturers and physician practices and supplies them to free and federally qualified clinics across the country, involving Good Shepherd, Palombo stated.

With estimates of more than thirty million uninsured persons nationwide, the requirement is massive and uninsured and low-income indivudals also suffer more chronic sicknesses, he claimed.

Help with prescriptions is falling short for millions, in spite of the Affordable Care Act, a separate federal program called as “340B” that gives steeply discounted drugs to several hospitals and federally qualified health centers, and drug manufacturers’ patient assistance programs.

Baker is crucial of the federal programs and said Good Shepherd does not participate in Medicare or any insurance program.

Huge deductibles that must be met before insurance pays under coverage available through Affordable Care Act leaves few sufferers unable to afford their drugs, he stated. And he called the 340B program “corrupted,” utilized as a profit-center for hospitals and health centers that need to treat it as one.

By giving free prescriptions to those with incomes that are eligible, at-cost drugs and tapping in to manufacturers’ patient assistance plans, Baker said Good Shepherd stitches together policies for both the uninsured and the insured. Sufferers with chronic conditions have become the major niche of agency.

Good Shepherd’s vision for providing services to employers and revolutionizing the industry also will assist to subsidize its charitable work and other ventures and will try to reduce the prescription costs.