Local governments, private businesses in Ohio left to fill pharmacy gaps that state isn't addressing

DANVILLE — Ohio Medicaid officials said patients’ access to pharmacies wouldn’t be hurt when the agency announced Wednesday that it is allowing the state’s largest managed-care provider to drop 252 Walgreens pharmacies from its network.

But pharmacists contend that the state’s access standards — and its punishments for violating them — are so lax as to be a joke. In fact, here in Danville in Knox County, the county government and a private business came together on the same day as the Medicaid announcement to fill what they saw as a yawning gap in health care access in their town.

But what they see as a gap is well within the pharmacy-access standards that Medicaid boasted about.

Wednesday was the grand opening of Conway’s Pharmacy and Knox County Community Health Center under a single roof. There had been an independent pharmacy there until 2017, when CVS bought and closed it and transferred customers’ prescriptions to the CVS in Mount Vernon, a 24-minute drive away.

Read more: https://www.dispatch.com/news/20191117/local-governments-private-businesses-in-ohio-left-to-fill-pharmacy-gaps-that-state-isnt-addressing
(Columbus Dispatch)