Last Tuesday at midnight, CVS officially changed its name to CVS Health and simultaneously cleared its 7,700 retail stores of tobacco products a month earlier than previously reported. Its stores will be called CVS Pharmacy with plans to expand its 900 primary care clinics to 1,500 by 2017, and its $90 billion pharmacy benefits management unit, CVS Caremark, continuing to play a key role in serving its 65 million customers(1).
And the following day, the CMS Office of the Actuary released its forecast of health spending, predicting that health spending will likely return to 6% annual increases for the next decade(2).
No doubt, the timing of the two is coincidental. But taken together, they paint a future state in healthcare that’s distinctly different from its recent past.
