This ran Friday, but the storm forced me to work from home, so I'm posting it today:
Doesn't take much prodding for Wal-Mart's detractors to draw devil's horns on the company's trademark smiley faces.
Their pencils went to work when the mongo chain announced it was cutting prices on a month's supply of some generic prescription drugs to $4. That's just a gimmick, opponents shouted.
They complained it was just an effort to paste a happy face on a company that won't offer a reasonable health care package. And they suggested the fancy rollout was overdone, considering the program covers just a small percentage of the drugs out there.
I'm not sure the intentions matter as long as people get relief.
A similar program by Target arrived in Wisconsin first, but Racine's Target store doesn't have a pharmacy. So, after the Wal-Mart program began here this week, I talked to pharmacy customers outside the Sturtevant store.
Curt Lowinske of Mount Pleasant picked up a variety of medications, from one treating gout to another dealing with acid reflux. Some were covered under the lowest price, while on the rest he got help from the pharmacist.
"He went through each prescription and found the lowest price he could give me," Lowinske said.
All pharmacists should do that, which is why Tom Engels wants people to check with their current pharmacy before switching. Engels is vice president of public affairs for the Pharmacy Society of Wisconsin, a Madison group that represents about half of the state's licensed pharmacists.
It's not the effect this'll have on competition that concerns him, but on safety. Pharmacists need to know all of a patient's medications so they can catch any that might cause problems if taken together.
Engels said if people cherry-pick drugs, grabbing the cheap ones from the big-box stores and the rest from their regular pharmacy, "neither pharmacy has an accurate picture." His advice is to pick one place and stick with it.
You can bet the biggest jump to the big-box plans will be among the roughly 10 percent of Wisconsinites with zero insurance. In a world of co-pays, the rest of us are so shielded from the costs they can seem like Monopoly money. Plus, until we dump the goofy state law that forces businesses to mark certain things higher, it'll cancel out some of the gain.
One guy who came for painkillers and antibiotics said he usually gets the best deals with online prescription services. But, with a wad of gauze stuffed in his mouth after dental surgery, he "wasn't going to wait for delivery this time."
Everybody I talked to at Wal-Mart was already a customer before this began. Like Union Grove's Ray Hansen, who came to the store for a muscle relaxant.
It was hard work earning price breaks. He sifted through the mound of insurance companies offering Medicare Part D plans, picking the only firm that could tell him what his out-of-pocket costs would be.
That's one reason we should cut the big boxes some slack on this one, even if their bark oversells the bite of the $4 pricing. In a health care system too dimly lit for the customer to see much, one bright number is a light to walk toward. |
