This article is fairly wordy. There is a hyperlink below where you can pull it up and read it.  However, the chart below is pretty telling

Key Points

Question  How does the risk of overdose change with the number of days with concurrent opioid and benzodiazepine use?

Findings  In this cohort study of US Medicare data, the overdose risk associated with concurrent benzodiazepine use changed over time. Concurrent benzodiazepine use was associated with a 5-fold increase in the risk of opioid-related overdose during the initial 90 days and an increase of 1.87 times on days 91 to 180.

Meaning  Policy interventions should focus on preventing concurrent opioid and benzodiazepine use in the first place instead of reducing the length of concurrent use. Patients using both medications should be closely monitored, particularly during the first days of concurrent use.

Association Between Concurrent Prescription Opioid and Benzodiazepine Use and Risk of Opioid-Related Overdose

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2685628

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

This is a very long blog post, so I asked a AI prgm to summarize it. 

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Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA’s Gamble on America’s Drugs

https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-drug-loophole-sun-pharma

Reporting Highlights

• Risky Medications: The FDA has given more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to continue sending drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants that the agency had banned.
• Troubled Factories: The medications came mostly from plants in India where inspectors found contaminated drugs, filthy labs and falsified records.
• FDA Secrecy: The agency did not proactively inform the public when drugs were exempted from import bans, and it did not routinely test the medications to ensure they were safe.

On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside.

For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for Americans.

Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records showing vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs.

Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States.

But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply.

A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients across the country, including those with cancer and epilepsy.

The FDA didn’t routinely test the medications for quality problems or use its vast repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming the people who relied on them.

And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress. Even others inside the FDA were unaware of the details.

In the hands of consumers, according to the FDA’s longtime head of drug safety, the information would have caused “some kind of frenzy.”

“We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” said Janet Woodcock, who spent nearly four decades at the agency.

The exemptions for Sun weren’t a one-time concession. A ProPublica investigation found that over a dozen years, the same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India. All told, the group allowed into the United States at least 150 medications or their ingredients from factories with mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols.

Some of the drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems, government records show. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about exempted drugs at three of those factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after they were excluded from import bans in 2022 and 2023.

The “adverse event” reports about drugs from the Sun plant and two others run by Indian drugmaker Intas Pharmaceuticals described medication with an abnormal taste, odor or residue or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems.

The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths. And those numbers are conservative. ProPublica limited its count to reports that linked problems to a single drug. However, the total number of complaints to the FDA that mention exempted drugs is in the thousands.

“Abdominal pain … stomach was acting very crazy,” one report said about a woman using a seizure drug from Sun Pharma. The FDA received the complaint in 2023, nine months after it excluded the medication from the import ban.

“Feeling really hot, breaking out with hives, hard to breathe, had confusion, glucose level was high, heart rate went up and head, arms and hands got numb,” noted another report about a patient taking a sedative from Intas. The complaint was sent to the FDA in June 2023, the same month the agency exempted the medication.

The outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drug or could be unexpected side effects. In some cases, the FDA received complaints about the same drugs made by other manufacturers.

Still, the seriousness of the reports involving exempted drugs did not galvanize the agency to investigate, leaving the public and the government with no way of knowing whether people were being harmed and, if so, how many.

Those unknowns have done little to slow the exemptions. In 2022, FDA inspectors described a “cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, finding workers had destroyed testing records, in one case pouring acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. At the second Intas factory, inspectors said in their report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

The FDA barred both plants in 2023 from shipping drugs to the U.S. Then the agency simultaneously granted more than 50 exemptions to those banned factories — the broadest use of exclusions in ProPublica’s analysis.

Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Both companies’ factories are still under import bans.

“We’re supposed to have the best medicine in the world,” said Joe DeMayo, a kidney transplant patient in Philadelphia who took an immunosuppression medication made by Intas until December 2023, unaware that a month earlier the FDA had excused the drug from an import ban. “Why are we buying from people who aren’t making it right?”

Game of Chance

How the United States wound up here — playing a game of chance with risky drugs made thousands of miles away — is the story of an agency that has relentlessly pressed to keep the supply of low-cost generics flowing even as its own inspectors warned that some of those drugs posed a potentially lethal threat to the American public.

The vast majority of the prescriptions filled in the country are for generic drugs, from penicillin to blood thinners to emergency contraception, and many of those come from overseas, including India and China. For years, the FDA has vouched for the quality of generics, assuring the public in press releases, speeches and social media campaigns that they are just as safe and effective as brand-name drugs.

That guarantee came under serious question in 2019 when journalist Katherine Eban published a breakthrough book, “Bottle of Lies,” that exposed rampant fraud and manufacturing violations in Indian factories and the FDA’s reluctance to aggressively investigate.

ProPublica identified another alarming level of entrenched failure: Even when the agency did investigate and single out factories that were among the worst in India, it still gave them access to American consumers. All the while, patients took their medicine without question, trusting an agency that has long been considered the gold standard in drug regulation.

While specialized business publications have sometimes reported on exemptions when they happen, they’ve offered little context and few specifics.

The FDA in many ways put itself in this untenable position, forced to decide between not having enough drugs or accepting potentially dangerous ones, interviews and government records show.

For years, the agency gave companies with a history of manufacturing breakdowns approval to produce an increasingly larger share of generic drugs, allowing them to become a dominant force in American medicine with the power to disrupt lives if production lines were shuttered.

“It’s our own fault,” said former FDA inspector Peter Baker, who reported a litany of failures during inspections in India and China from 2012 to 2018. “We allowed all these players into the market who never should have been there in the first place. They grew to be monsters and now we can’t go back.”

The decisions to weaken penalties and allow banned factories to continue sending drugs to the United States were approved by Woodcock, one of the agency’s most powerful administrators. For more than two decades, she led the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the arm of the FDA that serves as the country’s gatekeeper for new and generic drugs.

In a series of interviews with ProPublica, Woodcock said she supported the use of exemptions “as a practical approach.”

“We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said.

Woodcock said she didn’t see a need to inform the public because the agency believed the drugs were safe. She said she mentioned the practice periodically in closed-door meetings with congressional staffers, but she did not provide specifics about those conversations.

After Woodcock left her post in 2020 to help lead the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exemptions — including those for Sun and Intas — continued under her successor, Patrizia Cavazzoni. Cavazzoni, who left the agency earlier this year and rejoined Pfizer, declined to comment.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who led the agency when Sun and Intas received exemptions, told ProPublica that tough calls had to be made and the practice did not worry him.

The FDA did not respond to questions about who made those decisions or how the drugs were evaluated, and it declined requests for interviews with officials who currently oversee drug regulation. In an email, the agency said the exemptions are “thoroughly evaluated through a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Years after the FDA started granting exemptions, some current and former officials say they wrestle with a lingering fear that bad drugs are circulating in the United States.

“It’s not even a hypothetical,” said one senior FDA employee familiar with the exemptions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s not a question of if — it’s a question of how much.”

Although the FDA has been giving companies a way around import bans since at least 2013, the internal process was so secretive that many current and former FDA officials said they have no idea how many exemptions have been granted or for what drugs. In an email, the agency said it did not maintain a comprehensive list.

Even two high-level FDA staff members who worked on drug shortage challenges for the agency said in interviews they had never heard of the exemptions.

Congress required the FDA in 2012 to provide specific information every year about how and when the agency relaxed its rules for errant drugmakers to prevent shortages. But the FDA did not mention exemptions to import bans until 2024 — and only then in a single footnote of its 25-page report to Congress.

ProPublica uncovered the frequent use of exemptions by searching for the “import alert” list published on the FDA’s website that names factories banned from the U.S. marketplace. Because the agency publishes only a current list and doesn’t make the old ones public, the news organization used internet archives and FDA documents maintained by the data analytics company Redica Systems, ultimately compiling import alerts dating back more than a decade. The lists identify the drugs exempted from bans but provide few other details.

ProPublica reviewed scores of inspection reports and corporate documents for overseas factories and interviewed more than 200 people, including current and former officials of the FDA, to understand the little-known practice and the ongoing threat posed by the agency’s decisions.

The investigation revealed not only how many drugs received exemptions from import bans, but also how long the FDA allowed those exemptions to stay in place — in some cases for years.

The agency has removed exemptions when there is no longer a shortage concern. In those cases, the drugs are then banned along with the others at the factory. Both Sun and Intas have had drugs that lost their exemptions.

Two and a half years after the Sun factory was banned, five drugs are still exempted. Intas, whose factories were banned in 2023, currently has 24 drugs on the list. The bans themselves are removed only after companies fix the problems.

Earlier this month, the FDA went back to the Sun Pharma factory for a surprise inspection and found ongoing problems, according to a Sun filing with the Indian stock exchange and Indian media reports. The concerns focused on the way sterile drugs were made, including some of the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The FDA said it put protections in place for exempted drugs: Manufacturers are required to conduct additional quality checks before they are sent to the United States. That has included extra drug-safety testing, in some cases at an independent lab, and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

The agency did not provide ProPublica with the names of the third-party consultants hired by Sun and Intas. Intas declined to name its consultants.

“The odds of these drugs actually not being safe or effective is tiny because of the safeguards,” said one former FDA official involved in the exemptions who declined to be named because he still works in the industry and fears professional retribution. “Even though the facility sucks, it’s getting tested more often and it’s having independent eyes on it.”

But current and former FDA inspectors said those safety measures require trusting the vigilance of companies that were banned, at least in part, for providing unreliable or deceptive test results to the government or failing to investigate reports about drugs with contaminants or other quality concerns.

The FDA could have done its own routine testing of the exempted drugs but chose not to. The agency said in an email that it tests the drugs using a “risk-based approach” but would not provide ProPublica with any information about which drugs have been tested and what the results were.

Woodcock said testing was expensive and budgets were tight. She acknowledged that regularly assessing the exempted drugs for quality or safety concerns “would have enhanced our confidence … and made everyone more comfortable.”

The European Union, by contrast, requires drugs made in India and China to be checked for quality on EU soil. And the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting its own testing of more than three dozen generic medications and has already identified potency and other quality issues.

“If you don’t know about the quality of the product, why are you letting it in?” said Murray Lumpkin, the FDA’s former deputy commissioner for international programs, who left the agency in 2014 before most of the exemptions were granted.

Beyond the lack of testing, the FDA didn’t actively look for patterns of harm among the exempted drugs in its adverse event database, Woodcock and others said.

ProPublica’s analysis of that data found thousands of reports both before and after the factories were given a pass to sidestep import bans. The reports described unexpected cases of cardiac arrest, blurred vision, choking, vertigo and kidney injuries, among other issues — and in some instances identified specific concerns about how the drugs were made.
One person who took Intas’ clonazepam, a sedative and epilepsy drug, reported getting “brain zaps” and bright blue teeth from the coating of dye on the drug. The FDA received the complaint the same month the agency exempted the drug from the import ban.

Even before the FDA exempted Intas’ antidepressant bupropion, consumers reported that it made them sick, wasn’t always effective and had an abnormal odor, which pharmacists and others say can happen when an inactive ingredient breaks down.

“It was rotten eggs,” Nari Miller, a geologist in California who took the pills in 2022 and had severe stomach pain, told ProPublica. “I opened it and smelled it when I got home and it was awful.”

Intas said it could not respond to specific complaints and that all drugs have side effects. “Intas and Accord pay attention to each and every adverse event report,” the company said, adding, “Accord and Intas are committed to continuing to bring safe and effective medicines to patients.”

In its statement, the FDA said the database is monitored weekly for new reports in general. Woodcock, however, acknowledged the reports about exempted drugs, ideally, “would be under much more scrutiny.”

Too Big to Fail

Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions and the risks that now confront the American public.

When new brand-name drugs come to market, they are protected by patents and exclusive sales rights that make them generally expensive. When patents expire, generic drug companies rush in to make their own versions, which are supposed to be equivalent to the brand. Generics are often far cheaper, and insurance companies typically insist that patients use them.

In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA began to approve large numbers of generics. The agency, however, gave hundreds of those approvals to foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns at overseas factories, ProPublica found.

The FDA granted Sun Pharma alone more than 250 approvals for generic drugs since the late 2000s, when the company started amassing violations, records show. The agency’s decisions helped to transform the company from a local provider in India to one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, with nearly $2 billion in annual U.S. sales.

The approvals kept coming as inspectors continued to raise concerns about manufacturing practices at the company’s factories in India, government records show.

More problems were found at a factory that Sun had acquired in Detroit, where the diabetes drug metformin was contaminated with metal scrapings. The violations were so significant that federal marshals in 2009 raided the plant and seized drugs. The company eventually shuttered the factory.

The rapid expansion of Sun and other foreign drugmakers set off new alarms among inspectors, their supervisors and advisers to Woodcock.

“In a rational system, you would have said, ‘This company is not producing properly, so let’s not approve any more of their drugs,” said William Hubbard, former FDA deputy commissioner for policy, planning and legislation. “The agency in a sense kind of let this happen.”

Ajaz Hussain, the former deputy director of an FDA office that oversaw pharmaceutical science, said that after leaving the agency and becoming a consultant, he made his concerns known in meetings with Woodcock and others.

“They can’t manufacture it. Why do you keep approving it?” Hussain recalled in an interview with ProPublica. “I said, ‘Wake up.’ … But they didn’t listen.”

Hussain in 2012 went to work for Wockhardt, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India, but quit eight months later after he said he told his superiors about manufacturing failures in the company’s factories.

Although FDA inspectors had reported lapses after multiple visits to Wockhardt plants between 2004 and 2012, the agency cleared the way for the company to export sedatives, antibiotics, beta blockers, painkillers and other generics to the United States, records show. Wockhardt received exemptions from import bans in 2013. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but at the time, the company said it was going to quickly address the FDA’s concerns.

The FDA could have denied generic drug applications — nothing in the law prohibits the agency from saying no to companies with spotty track records. In an email, the FDA said it considers a company’s history and conducts inspections in some cases before issuing approvals.

Woodcock said the agency knew which factories were poor performers but feared being sued by companies blocked from introducing new drugs based on past behavior. Instead, she said that she tried to convince drugmakers to invest in equipment and practices that would turn out higher-quality drugs.

“We had many meetings about this, and we agonized about all these problems,” she said.

But little changed.

Shortages vs. Quality

 

In 2008, dozens of Americans were killed by contaminated blood thinner from China. So when Margaret Hamburg was appointed commissioner of the FDA in the aftermath of the crisis, she pressed the agency to crack down on overseas drugmakers.

Her efforts ran headlong into what would become the worst drug shortage in modern history. By 2010, cancer drugs were scarce. So were the drugs on hospital crash carts. In all, more than 200 critical medications were in short supply.

Razor-thin profit margins had limited the number of companies that were willing to make generic drugs. And the FDA’s enforcement overseas had forced some manufacturing lines to temporarily shut down, which exacerbated the problem.

Congress lambasted the FDA for the shortages and started requiring the agency to prove every year how it was combatting the problem.

At the time, the FDA had a small team focused on shortages that operated on the edges of Woodcock’s 4,000-person Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. With the pressure on, Woodcock elevated the team in 2010 to report directly to her deputy, a move that gave those staff members a commanding voice at the highest levels of the agency, several former staffers told ProPublica.

After 16 years in top leadership roles, Woodcock was formidable enough to force a culture change. Standing 5’2” in FDA conference rooms where she had often been disregarded as the lone woman, Woodcock had fought for her status — sometimes, she said, pushed nearly to tears with frustration. The board-certified internist asserted her authority by wielding data, what she called “brute force” and the soft persuasion of an occasional gift of an orchid, picked from her garden in suburban Maryland.

By 2010, Woodcock had marshalled the center into a powerhouse with great independence — in many ways, outside the reach of the political whims of the commissioners who came and went. Those who worked with her over the years said despite her approachable manner, she fiercely guarded her territory.

In the conference room next to Woodcock’s office, the drug shortage staff began to weigh in whenever the FDA’s compliance team moved to penalize wayward drugmakers because of bad inspections, according to several former FDA officials involved in the deliberations.

Sometimes the small group would decide that a factory could no longer ship drugs to the United States and would try to get other manufacturers to make more. And other times, the group determined that exemptions from import bans were the only course.

Discussions could be tense and often lasted for weeks. A former employee on the compliance team told ProPublica that they repeatedly argued to impose a total import ban on a foreign factory because they feared the drugs couldn’t be trusted. They were left feeling uncomfortable about an exemption granted anyway — for a product that they would not use themselves.

Without exemptions, Woodcock told ProPublica, the FDA might have been forced to source the drugs from a “totally unknown manufacturer, say, from China or somewhere.”

Current and former FDA officials said the concessions became a yearslong practice rather than a stopgap measure and that the protections put in place by the agency were not sufficient. They question why Woodcock and her successor didn’t do more to raise alarms with Congress or the public about the decision to rely on inadequate factories for critical drugs.

Woodcock said she thought the exemptions were a symptom of larger issues involving the drug supply that the FDA had no control over — the agency, for example, can’t force companies concerned about slim profit margins to produce generic drugs.

Two former FDA commissioners told ProPublica they knew about the practice but were not included in the decision-making.

Hamburg, who spent six years at the agency under the Obama administration, said the extent of the practice surprised her. “Had I known that it was sort of an open-ended policy, I would have been disturbed,” she said.

One of her successors, Stephen Hahn, appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term, said more people should have been involved in the decisions.

“You’re talking about a drug of questionable quality being brought into the country,” he said.

Woodcock said she did not believe she needed their input. “I didn’t think in the individual circumstances it was necessary to elevate,” she said, “because what could they do?”

“We Know What Was Found”

In 2020, the billionaire founder of Sun Pharma joined a pivotal conference call with FDA compliance and investigative staff.

Dilip Shanghvi, whose father had run a wholesale drug business in Kolkata, India, started the company in the 1980s and ultimately turned Sun Pharma into one of the largest suppliers of generic drugs in the United States. On the call, Shanghvi spoke about improvements at Sun’s enormous plant in the Indian city of Halol, according to an FDA official who attended the meeting.

Among other drugs, the plant produced at least 16 sterile injectables for the U.S. market, according to a Sun email to the FDA obtained by ProPublica. Injectables are particularly dangerous if contaminated because the medication is injected directly into the body, unlike a pill that goes through the filtering of the digestive tract.

In 2018 and 2019, inspectors had reported a series of violations at the factory, and Sun had received more than 700 complaints about what appeared to be crystals or spider webs forming in one of its injectable medications, records show.

The company also had to recall more than 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, after reports that the medication contained glass particles. Sun said the defect could cause life-threatening blood clots.

On the call with the FDA, according to the agency official, Shanghvi assured the government that the Halol plant was turning out high-quality products.

Yet, when the three investigators went back to the factory that scorching morning in 2022 for the surprise inspection, it was clear within days that the FDA would have to take swift action.

Splitting up to check different parts of the plant, the inspectors quizzed workers about cleaning procedures and looked at disassembled equipment to see if it was contaminated with residue from old drugs. At one point, they spotted water leaking near areas where sterile drugs were made, an alarming observation because water can introduce contaminants capable of causing infections or even death.

Digging through company records and test results, they found more evidence of quality problems, including how managers hadn’t properly investigated a series of complaints about foreign material, specks, spots and stains in tablets.

Several FDA employees familiar with the inspection report — 23 pages of detailed violations — said they had no idea why the agency went on to exclude so many of Sun’s drugs from the subsequent import ban.

“We know what was found,” said the FDA official who attended the meeting with Shanghvi. “How could you trust [those] drugs?”

Sun did not respond to questions about the recalls or its regulatory history with the FDA. In its 2023-24 annual report, the company said, “We have a relentless focus on 24×7 compliance to ensure continuity of supplies to our customers and patients worldwide.”

The specific findings of the FDA’s latest inspection of the Sun plant conducted this month have not yet been made public, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

To some current and former FDA officials and other experts, plugging a supply shortage with drugs that may be contaminated or ineffective is no solution at all.

“That might be helping a shortage but might be creating a new problem,” said Lumpkin, the former deputy commissioner.

Last summer, a pair of FDA investigators arrived at another manufacturing plant in India that had a bustling production line. After more than a week at the Viatris factory, they left with a familiar list of safety and quality violations.
We Spent a Year Investigating How the FDA Let Risky Drugs Into the U.S. Market

The inspectors found that equipment wasn’t clean and managers failed to thoroughly investigate unexplained discrepancies in test results.

In a statement to ProPublica, Viatris said it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said.

Just before Christmas, the FDA banned the facility from exporting drugs.

Then the agency gave the factory a pass, and four of its drugs are still bound for the United States.

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EPIDEMIC OF PHARMACY DESERTS BEING CREATED

 

CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid are all set to close stores. Hundreds have already shuttered

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/05/29/cvs-walgreens-rite-aid-pharmacy-stores-closing/83922662007/

It has been a rough stretch for large pharmacy chains.

CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid are all in the midst of mass closures, and Rite Aid recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time in as many years.

Mass closures extend beyond the retail pharmacy space, however, as other companies such as Forever 21, Joann, Macy’s, Denny’s, Bahama Breeze and more have announced locations would shutter this year.

Here’s the latest on pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, including how many stores each company is planning to close.

How many Rite Aid stores are closing?

Rite Aid announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again on May 5, the second time since October 2023. Bankruptcy filings have identified 316 store locations Rite Aid has tapped for closure.

On May 15, Rite Aid said it “successfully entered into a series of sale agreements and pharmacy services transition agreements,” which would include transitioning pharmacy assets from locations across the U.S. to CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Albertsons, Kroger, Giant Eagle and other operators. Rite Aid and Bartell Drugs stores in some states will also be operated by CVS Pharmacy as part of the sale agreements, which were approved on May 21 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of New Jersey, according to Rite Aid’s bankruptcy docket.

During the transition of prescription files, Rite Aid said its stores will remain open and customers can continue to access their pharmacy services, including prescription refills and immunizations. Before the bankruptcy filing, Rite Aid operated 1,240 stores across 15 states.

“A key priority for Rite Aid is to ensure that as many of our loyal customers as possible continue to receive the pharmacy services and care they require without interruption,” Matt Schroeder, CEO of Rite Aid, said in a statement. “These agreements ensure our pharmacy customers will experience a smooth transition while preserving jobs for some of our valued team members.”

Rite Aid has buyers for customer files at 810 of its stores, but did not find a buyer for files at 200 other locations, according to Reuters. While the deadline to enter bids for Rite Aid’s pharmacy assets (May 13) has passed, the deadline to enter bids for the chain’s remaining assets, including the Thrifty Ice Cream business, is June 13, with an auction date set for June 20.

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If you are choosing or forced to use a chain pharmacy where the Pharmacy department/staff looks like chaos is SOP, or your prescriptions never seems to be ready. You can complain to the state’s pharmacy board, but most state pharmacy boards are stacked with non practicing corporate Pharmacists. The primary function of the pharmacy board is to protect public safety. When most pharmacy boards are stacked with non-practicing corporate Pharmacists, who do you think their concerns are focused? Their employer and their pay checks, or how long you have to wait to get your Rxs filled or how many pts get the wrong medication in their bottle? Just remember, you only have one life and getting the wrong medications, could adversely affect that!

 

TWO MORE PHARMACY TRAGEDIES

https://pharmacistactivist.com/2025/June_2025.shtml

As this June issue of The Pharmacist Activist was being finalized, I was made aware of the suicides of two CVS pharmacists that occurred just days apart in mid-June. The pharmacists worked at two stores that are approximately 5 miles apart. One of them had worked for CVS for more than 20 years and was well known to those in his community and also to other local well-connected pharmacists in a community that still has an active county association. The other pharmacist was a relatively recent graduate. I do not know the factors that may have resulted in their tragic decisions. It is my understanding that CVS management has “informed” the other employees in the two stores that they must not respond to questions about or discuss these events.

I called CVS corporate headquarters in Rhode Island to ask if CVS had prepared a statement such as a tribute to the service of these pharmacists. After being placed “on-hold” for about 10 minutes, I was informed that no information was available.

We pray for and extend our sympathy to the families and friends who are coping with the grief from the loss of these loved ones.

Thousands of pharmacies have closed and their prescription files are being transferred to those which remain. In many of these latter pharmacies, increased staffing will be required to handle the increased workload. If sufficient staffing is not provided, the number of errors will increase and pharmacists and other employees will be overwhelmed. Please do not place your patients or yourselves at risk! If you experience continued understaffing in your workplace, IGNORE the metrics and REDUCE your work and time commitment (e.g., the number of prescriptions for which you have responsibility) to the level that YOU consider to be SAFE for your PATIENTS and for YOURSELF. DO NOT come in early or work later to attempt to reduce a backlog that you did not cause and will not be able to resolve. DOCUMENT your experiences and discussions with leaders/managers/owners. CONFIDE in other pharmacists whom you know are experiencing similar challenges and stress for the purpose of supporting and “monitoring” each other. If you, or a family member or friend, feels your stress/anxiety are affecting your mental health (e.g., “I don’t like the person I have become”), SEEK PROFESSIONAL COUNSELING AND REQUEST MEDICAL LEAVE. You are loved, valued, and needed!

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Some of what is said in this article reminds me of when Medicare implemented DRG (Diagnostic Related Groups) in the early 80’s. The hospital was paid a specific $$ when a pt was admitted to the hospital, based on the diagnose(s) that the pt was dealing with. If the hospital spent less than allotted for a pt, the hospital got to keep the excess payment. If the hospital ended up spending more on the pt’s care than the DRG provided, the hospital had to “eat” the extra cost. This is the time that I expanded our pharmacy into supplying Home Medical Equipment, because pts were being discharged QUICKER & SICKER.

Notice that everywhere in this article when they mention better pt care and saving money. IMO, the reality is they are saving money and the pt ends up with BETTER CARE… that is a PLUS 

CVS Health’s Aetna supports industry actions to simplify prior authorization

https://drugstorenews.com/cvs-healths-aetna-supports-industry-actions-simplify-prior-authorization

Aetna, a CVS Health company, said it is committed to distinctive actions that will make it easier to navigate the healthcare system.

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How Genetic Testing Could Prevent Dangerous Drug Reactions and Reduce Healthcare Costs

https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/06/24/how-genetic-testing-could-prevent-dangerous-drug-reactions-and-reduce-healthcare

Tailoring medicines to an individual’s genetic profile is now possible. One critical aspect is genetic testing that reduces side effects, particularly for patients on psychiatric and cardiovascular drugs.

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The IMPORTANT PART starts abt 3:00 minutes

What does abortion have to do with pain management. This FL Rep almost died from a Ectopic pregnancy that practitioners in a ED was not wanting to terminate this woman’s ectopic pregnancy.  The member of Congress was facing the fears of a practitioners of losing their licenses, because of a very restrictive FL abortion law, which EXEMPTS terminating an ectopic pregnancy.

If the practitioners kept scratching their heads about what to do about Rep. Kat Cammack’s ectopic pregnancy, the possible outcomes for Cammack was for the ectopic pregnancy to rupture and she would bleed to death, have the ectopic pregnancy removed by invasive surgery procedure – most likely making Rep. Kat Cammack sterile and not able to have any more children or give her the medication methotrexate to help her body to safely “remove” the ectopic pregnancy.

Here is a member of  Congress that has a first hand experience of how Congress’ attempt to implement laws based on our society’s puritanical thread to protect us from ourselves. Just another example of how bureaucrats and politicians are implementing laws without considering “exceptions to the rules”.

Maybe chronic pain pts in her district should reach out to her and explain to her how some chronic painers that are not able to get their necessary medications and some are dying and/or committing suicides to finally resolve their chronic pain.

Rep. Kat Cammack’s represents Florida’s 3rd congressional district and her offices:

 

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How Insurance/PBM industry use PAs to pad their bottom line

The above article that I made a blog post about a couple of days ago, explains how FOR PROFIT insurance/PBM companies can make extra profits on your prescriptions. I recently had our Past D provider HUMANA, decided that a Rx that I had filled in 03/2025 did not need a PA but when I went to refill it 05/2025 that it required a PA because there was a INTERACTION between this med and another med – both I have been taking for years.

Doing some research, I discovered while a Insurance/PBM company does not charge for a PA – BUT – they keep track the cost of handling a PA – range of $11 to upwards in the $40.  The information that I found out was not clear if they add that cost when they require a PA and/or if they only add that cost when they approve a PA. Keep in mind, 90% of PAs are APPROVED.

Apparently, these insurance/PBM companies fold all these estimated costs into what their overall cost to handle a particular group and some definition of a group of pts. 

My particular Rx previously had a copay of $2.07 and I am in my deductible period. So in the March, 2025 refill, Humana paid out ZERO.  I have no idea what Humana Part D will end up billing/costing the feds. 

Delays and Denials in Medicare Advantage

Fixing the Systemic Conflict of Interest

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2835645

The growth of privatized Medicare is increasing the rates of prior authorizations and claim denials, creating barriers to care, increasing administrative waste, and demoralizing clinicians.¹ At the core of this problem lies a conflict of interest: the Medicare Advantage (MA) insurance companies that profit from denials are entrusted to make neutral determinations of medical necessity as they apply Medicare’s coverage rules. They do not. Unsurprisingly, MA plans serve their financial interests first, and they are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to these ends. Now is the time for a systemic fix: Congress should require that an independent third party make coverage and payment decisions, building on the network of Medicare contractors that already fulfill this function in Traditional Medicare (TM).

Privatized Medicare began in the 1970s when Medicare contracted with nonprofit medical group–based health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that sought to improve quality and reduce costs with an integrated model of care. In the 1980s, as part of a shift toward market-oriented solutions, Congress allowed for-profit, insurer-based entities to participate in Medicare’s prepaid option. These insurers contracted with clinicians and medical institutions in network HMOs. With no ability to improve care, they created new administrative functions, such as prior authorization and claims reviews, to control costs.

By the late 1980s, prior authorizations and denials were drawing scrutiny amid a broader backlash to the utilization management tactics of managed care. For example, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) warned in 1989 that utilization controls risked delaying or denying necessary care, echoing mounting concerns across government and the medical profession.² Policymakers nonetheless doubled down on managed care in Medicare, with reforms in 1997 and 2003 that created today’s MA program. Proponents defended prior authorization and other utilization controls as essential to lowering costs, and expected that potential abuses would be mitigated by market competition and the appeals process.

Far from it. MA has failed in its central promise of cost containment, now costing more than 20% what TM does, and MA is rife with care denials, delays, and postservice payment downgrades. In contrast to TM, MA plans subject nearly all beneficiaries to some form of prior authorization.³ Based on prior studies, we estimated that MA plans required prior authorization for 50 million services in 2024, or 1 for every 1.5 members, compared with only 400 000, or 1 for every 80 enrollees, in TM. Insurers strategically understaff and slow-walk adjudication of prior authorization to dissuade clinicians from ordering services. As a result, millions of necessary services are delayed by days or weeks. MA insurers denied authorization an estimated 3.2 million times (6.4%) or approximately once for every 10 enrollees. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG), approximately 13% of all MA denials were inappropriate or would be covered in TM.¹ Additionally, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) rarely prohibits a service from being preauthorized, allowing plans to simply overwhelm the system with the magnitude of disputes.

MA insurers also refuse to reimburse clinicians and medical institutions for services that patients have already received. According to the OIG, these postservice payment denials average 9.5% of all claims, totaling 56 million claims, or nearly 2 per enrollee in 2018. MA plans also downgrade claims after services are furnished. For example, these insurers often recategorize an inpatient stay to an outpatient visit, effectively overruling the clinician’s decision that a patient needed to be hospitalized. UnitedHealthcare explained that paying the lower outpatient rate decreases their costs by approximately $5 billion per year.⁴

For clinicians and patients, the burden of 50 million preauthorizations, 3.2 million service denials, 56 million claims denials, and 5 million appeals is immense. Medical institutions and clinicians contract with an average of 8 different insurance companies offering 43 different MA plans, each with proprietary criteria and processes. This vast MA administrative superstructure, duplicated for the commercially insured population, contributes to US administrative costs that are as much as 4 times that of certain peer countries.⁵ When a service or payment is denied, patients and clinicians can appeal, but that process is onerous, too. Although they prevail 80% of the time, they appeal only 10% of denials. Therefore, for insurers, this deny-by-attrition strategy yields savings 92% of the time.

Privatized Medicare was not supposed to work this way. MA plans are mandated by law to cover the same benefits as TM and follow Medicare coverage rules. However, MA insurers often refuse to follow them. For example, the OIG found that an MA plan denied follow-up magnetic resonance imaging for a lesion within a year even though Medicare does not impose such a time restriction. Additionally, MA plans are permitted to establish their own internal coverage criteria for services that lack fully established coverage rules. Although plans are instructed to follow the clinical literature, this frequently requires subjective judgments that become motivated by insurers’ financial interests.

More fundamentally, Medicare’s most basic coverage rule—that a given service is reasonable and necessary—often requires a determination of medical necessity that is vulnerable to abuse by conflicted insurers. To take a common example in MA, an older adult patient who experiences a stroke may be stable enough to be discharged to the home or may need institutional care. This determination is highly case-dependent and involves careful clinical judgment, but MA plans are motivated to conclude that expensive institutional care is not medically necessary. MA plans may even be delegating medical necessity determinations to AI, allegedly using AI tools to make thousands of clinical necessity decisions in seconds without considering individual patient needs.⁶

For decades, observers have raised concerns about denials in managed care, researchers proposed various solutions, and regulators have promulgated rules to clamp down on certain conduct. However, these solutions stop short of addressing the core conflict of interest. Fortunately, a solution lies in plain sight. TM uses third-party contractors, known as Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs), to implement coverage rules, engage in targeted prior authorization, and process and adjudicate claims. They also develop certain local coverage determinations to supplement Medicare’s coverage rules. Although MACs are not perfect, they do have one major advantage over MA insurers: they are not biased toward denying care. MACs are paid a simple administrative fee. They are not at risk for medical costs and have no financial interest in denying services or payments. This process is efficient: CMS spends less than 2% on administrative costs, compared with approximately 13% in MA.

Congress should expand MAC capacity to MA, creating an “MA Administrative Contractor” that is funded by a small fee on MA plans. These contractors would conduct all preauthorization and claims adjudication processes for all MA insurers, neutrally applying current Medicare rules and continuously developing evidence-based and standardized coverage rules. MA insurers would remain responsible for paying clinicians and medical institutions once services were adjudicated by an MA Administrative Contractor. MA Administrative Contractors would replace MA’s opaque and fragmented administrative layer with a low-cost and transparent process. Additionally, they could rapidly enhance digital interfaces and properly steward AI adoption to apply Medicare coverage rules and reduce administrative expenses. CMS could also decide to incorporate insights from MA Administrative Contractors into analogous processes in TM.

Congress should respond constructively to widespread dissatisfaction with prior authorization and denials in the current MA system. Incorporating the existing approach in TM is a promising path forward.

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