I am a Senior Pharmacy Benefit Contract Analyst for a state public-employee prescription drug benefit covering one hundred and eighty-four thousand members, and when I tied out two contract years of monthly file exchanges on a Sunday afternoon I saw that the rate the pharmacy benefit manager — whose VP of Network Strategy had sent me a thank-you Rioja from his bodega in Logrono after a national policy panel — was paying pharmacies for generic fills was not the rate they had been billing the state under the contract’s pass-through clause that he had initialed in his own handwriting beside mine.

I am a Senior Pharmacy Benefit Contract Analyst for a state public-employee prescription drug benefit covering one hundred and eighty-four thousand members, and when I tied out two contract years of monthly file exchanges on a Sunday afternoon I saw that the rate the pharmacy benefit manager — whose VP of Network Strategy had sent me a thank-you Rioja from his bodega in Logrono after a national policy panel — was paying pharmacies for generic fills was not the rate they had been billing the state under the contract’s pass-through clause that he had initialed in his own handwriting beside mine.

ByDorte Karman
I am the state prison dietitian who knows what a real USDA-FSIS inspection seal looks like under a ten-power loupe, and the morning I pulled three meat blocks at the loading dock and matched the stamps against the authenticated reference in our QA freezer, I understood my facility’s commissary vendor had been shipping condemned meat under counterfeit seals for at least eight months — and a sixty-seven-year-old man named Jamal Jones had already died of what the death roster called “cardiac arrest, age-related.”

I am the state prison dietitian who knows what a real USDA-FSIS inspection seal looks like under a ten-power loupe, and the morning I pulled three meat blocks at the loading dock and matched the stamps against the authenticated reference in our QA freezer, I understood my facility’s commissary vendor had been shipping condemned meat under counterfeit seals for at least eight months — and a sixty-seven-year-old man named Jamal Jones had already died of what the death roster called “cardiac arrest, age-related.”

ByDorte Karman