HOPE — As Hope residents face the loss of the town’s only drug store, the top administrator of the pharmacy’s parent company is placing the blame of the upcoming closing on Big Pharma and their lobbyists.
WindRoseRx, 645 Harrison St., will close its doors April 15, WindRose Health Network CEO Scott Rollett has confirmed.
Strong public support for a Hope pharmacy has been evident for decades, as nearly 10 percent of the town’s population aged 65 to 74 live below the poverty line, according to the most recent statistics available from City-Data.com. Many older residents need a local pharmacy because they are home bound due to disabilities, town leaders have said.
Although overall income levels in Hope have risen over the past few years, the most recent figures available through City-Data.com show those levels are still lower than in Columbus.
Those figures show the median household income at $56,711 annually in Hope, compared to $75,114 in Columbus. Hope has 23.8% of its children living below the poverty level, while the figure in Columbus is at 15.7%
In a 2022 interview, on-site pharmacy technician Teresa Turner said she was aware some Hope residents didn’t patronize the local pharmacy out of concern that it might close. But according to Rollett, most Hope residents expressed gratitude that WindRoseRx was located on the northeast side of the town square.
“It really breaks my heart to be honest with you,” Rollett said. “Unfortunately, with the high price of pharmaceuticals, it’s going to be darn near impossible for small, independent organizations to operate a pharmacy. Unfortunately, Big Pharma is making big profits right now.”
As a community health center, the WindRose Health Network facilities in Hope initially benefited from Section 340B of the Public Health Service Act, Rollett said. The legislation required pharmaceutical manufacturers participating in Medicaid to sell outpatient drugs at discounted prices to health care organizations that care for many uninsured and low-income patients.
But in 2020, pharmaceutical manufacturers began putting restrictions on what drugs they’d sell at discounted prices to community health centers and other health care facilities serving low-income populations, Rollett said.
“Over the past almost four years, they’ve continued to tighten their restrictions to where almost nothing is covered anymore,” Rollett said. “A lot of drugs are over a thousand bucks a script.”
When those restrictions began in the fall of 2020, they did not have a huge effect on WindRose, Rollett said. The large pharmaceutical companies made a deal with health care organizations serving low-income patients “that if they played by Big Pharma’s rules, they would continue to have access to their pricing,” the WindRose CEO said.
With discounted pricing, community health centers passed the savings on to their patients through reduced drug prices, as well as invested additional savings to expand access and improve health outcomes, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers website.
“But as time has gone on, they have kind of taken that away,” Rollett said. “A lot of the pharmaceuticals now restrict their contract pharmacies to one. I have two pharmacies, but can only get discounted pricing at one of them.”
The cost of medicines without discounted prices can easily push the poor further into poverty, disease and even death, according to the website. Efforts have been underway for a few years to persuade Congress to lift the restrictions, but in 2022 alone, U.S. drug companies spent over $375 million to lobby federal lawmakers, the website states.
“By and large, (members of Congress) are choosing not to touch it,” Rollett said.
For most of the 20th century, there was at least one, if not two, drug stores operating in the Hope area. But when Mills Pharmacy closed its doors on the north side of the town square in 1987, the community went almost 30 years without its own pharmacy.
In 2006, Community Center of Hope founder Julie Glick Begin said during a public address that the town needed to make acquiring a pharmacy a top priority. Later that year, the acquisition of a drug store was specifically mentioned in the town’s comprehensive plan.
But it would be nearly 11 years later before a Bloomington-based company opened the Hope Wellness Pharmacy in the Simpson building, next to the Hope library.
In July 2019, a representative of Hope Wellness told the town council his business was financially struggling. The pharmacy finally closed in April 2021 after being bought out by CVS Pharmacy, Inc., the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.
WindRoseRx opened at the same location on May 23, 2022. Like its predecessor, WindRoseRx used telepharmacy, which refers to the delivery of pharmaceutical care via telecommunications where patients don’t have direct contact with the pharmacist approving the prescription. However, those customers did have face-to-face contact with certified pharmacy technicians employed at the Hope location.
When Hope Wellness was in operation, the pharmacist available through teleconferencing was at the company’s parent firm, Panacea Pharmacy, in Bloomington. The WindRoseRx pharmacist who spoke with patients through a television monitor was at the company’s pharmacy on the south side of Indianapolis, Rollett said.
Although the Hope pharmacy will close in two weeks, Rollett said WindRoseRx will continue to mail non-narcotic prescriptions to customers from one of their other locations.
