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