CHELSEA — The town of Chelsea is losing its sole pharmacy for the second time in three years, the latest Upper Valley pharmacy to close its doors as small, independent pharmacies find it increasingly harder to remain viable.
The Chelsea Medicine Shoppe, which opened as a medication dispensary in the Chelsea Health Center in September 2018, will close Tuesday, Sept. 24, said Emily Otis, the pharmacy tech who has been managing the five-day-week dispensary since last October. She said prescriptions will automatically be transferred to Medicine Shoppe’s Barre location unless customers indicate another pharmacy where they would prefer their prescriptions to be directed.
The Chelsea Medicine Shoppe was meant to fill the void created when Kinney Drugs closed its Chelsea pharmacy in 2016. But a combination of changing industry business practices and a smaller-than-hoped customer base made the 400-square foot dispensary unprofitable, said Jeff Nichol, marketing director and compliance officer at the 12-location Medicine Shoppe chain.
“We were doing 90 to 100 prescriptions a week when we really had to get up to 200 to 250 a week to break even. We saw the script count grow to about 100 and it hit a wall there,” Nichol said on Wednesday. “We’re pretty disappointed and had hoped to be there much longer obviously.”
Nichol said another factor is the role that prescription benefit managers (PBM) play in the economics of the business. PBMs act as a middleman between drugmakers and insurance companies by negotiating with drugmakers on which drugs will be covered by insurance plans and how much the plan will pay pharmacies for them.
Rural independent pharmacies say they caught between third-party PBMs who have been pushing down reimbursement levels to unprofitable levels and insurance companies directing customers into mail-order prescription delivery plans, which they say are both having a deleterious effect on their business.