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NCPA makes end of year push for N.Y. Assembly’s Pharmacy Rescue Package

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. The National Community Pharmacists Association is supporting pharmacists in New York as they call for Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to enact three bills in the Pharmacy Rescue

Package and protect patient access to local pharmacy care. The bills have been sitting on Hochul’s desk for several months after the package was passed by an overwhelming majority of the state legislature in June. NCPA, the country’s largest organization of independent pharmacy owners, is going online with digital advertising in the Albany area in favor of the legislation.

“While small-business pharmacies have been in overdrive throughout the pandemic to provide health care and vaccines, they’re being squeezed by pharmacy benefit manager tactics like low or below-cost reimbursements, patient steering, spread pricing, and conflicts of interest that allow these megacompanies to create networks that favor their own affiliated pharmacies – tactics that can harm patients and their access to care, too,” says NCPA CEO B. Douglas Hoey. “Several times over the years the New York legislature has come close to regulating these massive out-of-state middlemen, only to be inexplicably thwarted by the chief executive. NCPA strongly encourages Gov. Hochul to take this opportunity to protect the state’s patients and local pharmacies.”

NCPA is asking the governor to support S.6603/A.7598, which would require Medicaid managed care plans to reimburse pharmacies at a transparent rate that more closely reflects the pharmacies’ acquisition costs plus a commensurate professional dispensing fee; S.3762/A.1396, which deals with the registration and licensure of pharmacy benefit managers in the state; and S.3566/A.5854A, which would ban mandatory mail order and protect patients’ ability to use the pharmacy of their choosing. Hochul has until the end of 2021 to sign the rescue package into law, veto it, or let it take effect.


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