Big Health-Care Players Are Turning Their Partners Into Prey
- In chain of drug suppliers, pressure on each slice of profit
- PBMs, insurers have pushed out smaller pharmacy partners
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Over 20 years, Brian Komoto built a thriving pharmacy in California’s Central Valley. Each day, his nurses would travel the vast agricultural region’s roads to help hepatitis C patients take a grueling regimen of shots.
Then, in 2016, 20 percent of Komoto’s business vanished, practically overnight. The insurer Centene Corp. purchased the health plan that covered his patients -- many of them Hispanic farm workers who had developed a level of trust with Komoto’s traveling nurses. Centene had its own mail-order pharmacy, and it told the patients to go there instead, he said.