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Blue Shield CA, CVS Caremark & the mystery of the extra $116, with 2 UPDATES (at the end)

By MATTHEW HOLT

Today we’re going to have fun with show and tell. I’m going to show you how a little corner of American health care is making my life as a consumer worse and more expensive–hopefully someone can tell me why.

The cast members are: me, my MD, the (sort of) independent pharmacy that delivers, Alto, and my insurer Blue Shield of California and its PBM CVS Caremark, which also owns a mail order pharmacy.

The brief backstory: For some years my doctor has been whining about my high cholesterol, and a few years back I went on a statin called Rosuvastatin Calcium. Older readers may remember Jean Luc Picard himself advertising the branded version Crestor, but it’s been off patent for about a decade. About 50 million Americans now take a statin, almost all of them a generic, including many 60 year old males like me. My cholesterol has come down, but my MD told me it could come down more, so a few months ago we boosted the dose to 40mg from 20mg. 

Until recently I’d been insured by BCBS Massachusetts, and you might recall a little over a year ago I wrote a piece on THCB about the fun and games to be had trying to figure out what their PBM (CVS Caremark) was doing with the pricing of my kid’s ADHD medication. But they’d never messed with my medication as my statins are cheap. At least I thought they were. In fact as recently as April last year, they were free. You can see the price from the delivery from Alto Pharmacy below.

How BCBS Mass came up with $0.00 as the price I pay I don’t know, but presumably they think it’s a good thing to have me on statins in the hope I don’t have an (expensive) heart attack instead.

Then for some reason my price for the statin later the same year went up to $23. No longer $0 but at $8 a month not really worth making a fuss about.

At the end of the year, COBRA expired and I went to buy insurance on the California exchange. And in order to keep access to my family’s doctors at One Medical, I chose the only plan they were in, the Blue Shield of California HMO.

My next 90 day supply was the first one which went from 20mg to 40mg, but it’s still a common generic. Blue Shield of California also uses CVS Caremark (although it’s been talking a good game of ditching CVS Caremark and setting up its own PBM) and the cost at Alto barely budged. Now it was $28.

What happened next: So all was going normally until late last week when my next 90 supply was delivered. Except it wasn’t. Alto delivered me a 30 day supply and charged me $19.

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