MOSCOW — Trends in the insurance industry helped force one of Moscow’s last independently owned pharmacies out of business.
Marketime Drug at 872 Troy Road, Suite 120, closed Aug. 31. The prescriptions of customers have been transferred to Moscow’s Safeway.
Two Marketime employees, a pharmacist and a pharmacy technician, took new jobs there, said Erik Nelson, the pharmacist who owned Marketime at the time it closed.
Founded in 1952, Marketime faced a number of challenges, said Nelson, who acquired the business in 2018 and moved it from downtown to Troy Road in 2020.
Reimbursement rates from insurance providers were less than acquisition costs for close to 50% of its prescriptions, Nelson said.
“When the pharmacy is getting paid below its cost to acquire the drug to the tune of up to hundreds of dollars it doesn’t take too long to realize that is an unsustainable business model,” Nelson said in a letter he sent to customers.
Marketime lost hundreds of customers when patients insured by Kaiser Permanente were required to fill maintenance medications through Kaiser Permanente’s own mail-order pharmacy, Nelson said.
Direct and indirect remuneration fees that are “clawed back” from pharmacies as long as six months after purchases also played a role in Marketime’s demise, he said.
At Marketime, those fees jumped from $50,520 in 2021 to $88,527 in 2022 and had reached $61,938 at Marketime in 2023 before the pharmacy closed, Nelson said.
“These fees are taken directly from pharmacies and go straight back to the insurance companies,” according to Nelson’s letter.
Nelson’s three other pharmacies remain open. They are facing pressures similar to Marketime, but they are not as severe, he said.
The three pharmacies are Koru Pharmacy and Sixth Avenue Medical Pharmacy, both in Spokane, and Suncrest Pharmacy in Nine Mile Falls, Wash.
One of the few solutions, Nelson said, is for consumers to contact state and local legislators about the issues.
