CVS’s Tobacco-Free Pharmacy Network Could Change Where You Fill Prescriptions
Ready to quit?
CVS has spent the last eight months asking that question of smokers across the country as the drug store chain has engaged in a conscious uncoupling from tobacco products by wiping them off its shelves. And now, the pharmacy giant is taking things a step further.
The company announced on Tuesday that it would begin offering a “tobacco-free pharmacy network’’ to the employers, unions, and insurance companies for which it manages prescription benefits. Sounds great, right? The ostensible idea is that it would keep customers from even being tempted to buy tobacco products while pressuring stores that do carry them to stop.
The thing is, if your employer, union, or insurance company does opt into the network, and you do fill your prescription at the wrong store (i.e., one that continues to sell tobacco products), you’ll get hit with an extra copay fee—in some cases as high as $15 more.
You can be a smoker. You can be a non-smoker. You can live in a hermetically sealed bubble and hold your breath at the mere sight of a cigarette. If your provider goes with this plan and you fill a prescription at the wrong store, you’re going to pay either way.
And if that feels a bit unfair, that’s probably because this doesn’t seem to be about what’s fair. CVS says it’s about keeping its customers healthy and helping them avoid using tobacco products.
But is that what’s really happening? The Surgeon General released its first report condemning cigarettes all the way back on Jan. 11, 1964. Are we really expected to believe it took more than 50 years for CVS to get the idea that cigarettes are bad? Or is it more likely that it simply took CVS 50 years to come up with the most genius strategic move ever?
CVS probably isn’t out to destroy the tobacco industry. And while it may care about your health, it stands to make a decent amount of money every time you get sick. So could it be that CVS’s healthy image and continued attacks on the tobacco industry are just a smokescreen – a way to make competitors like Walgreens and Rite-Aid look bad for offering you things that can kill you?
It could certainly come off that way. And that kind of makes us wonder: What exactly CVS is asking us when it says “ready to quit?’’ Is it smoking? Or is it just shopping at other drug stores?
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