Doris Spatz takes a once-a-day pill, Kisqali, to keep her metastatic breast cancer in check. As a patient in the Defense Department health system, she can fill routine prescriptions at a military pharmacy without a copay but also has the option of using a regular pharmacy through Tricare, the Defense Department’s private health care program.
Spatz found a local pharmacy in her Alexandria, Virginia, neighborhood and was getting the life-preserving medicine there.
That is, until Oct. 24, when Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefit manager for Tricare, dropped nearly 15,000 pharmacies from its network. Many of them were small, independent pharmacies, like Neighborhood Pharmacy of Del Ray, where Spatz was a customer.
