The Medicine Shoppe closes
Changing health care market among factors cited for decision
POTTSTOWN >>
The closure of a local pharmacy that has stood at the corner of Beech and North Charlotte streets for 30 years can be chalked up to the changing health care market, according to the owners.
The Medicine Shoppe officially closed Dec. 14, one of two shuttered last year by Mechanicsburg-based Care Capital Management Inc. The mid-sized company still operates 16 other Medicine Shoppes in Pennsylvania, said Helen Clark, director of operations for the company that is owned by CL Cressler Inc.
“Those two locations have been on the radar for some time,” said Clark, who said the other location closed was located in New Cumberland.
Clark said several factors contributed to the decision to close the Pottstown location.
Perhaps the most significant was the loss two years ago of the KenCrest account.
“When you lose a big account like that, a nursing home that accounts for a large number of prescriptions, that was our first real setback and that’s a hard thing to come back from.”
Also a factor is changing rules with health insurance, specifically something called DIR fees, which is a fine insurance companies impose on pharmacies for “non-compliant patients.”
That is the term for patients who have multiple prescriptions but do not refill them on schedule, either because they can’t afford to or don’t think they need to.
“It’s something we have no
control over and the insurance companies keep cutting our reimbursements,” said Clark, who added that she was on hand helping out for the pharmacy’s final days.
“A lot of our customers were very attached to the pharmacist, Caroline Murphy, and it was sad because many of our patients really cherished their relationship with Caroline,” Clark said. “They kept saying ‘who is going to take care of me?’ It was very moving, very emotional and bittersweet.”
The closing may create difficulties for Medicine Shoppe customers who were on home delivery.
“That was well over 50 percent of the business there, a lot of elderly people who required specialized packaging that indicated the time and frequency to take medicines,” Clark said. “That’s very labor intensive and the insurance companies are not paying us extra to prepare those packages.”
The shop was not always run by Care Capital Management Inc. It used to be run by Andrew and Barbara Naglak, who still own the building.
Although they sold the Pottstown business in 1989, they still operated other Medicine Shoppes in Berks County.
“We retired seven years ago,” Barbara Naglak, speaking from Florida, recently told MediaNews Group.
She was not surprised to hear about the closure in Pottstown, Naglak said.
“More and more independent pharmacies are going out of business all the time,” she said.
Although there is “a very large four-bedroom apartment” on the second floor with a tenant, the couple is not sure what kind of commercial tenant will occupy the first floor space next.
“We’re not actively seeking tenants. When we come back up from Florida in the spring, we’ll start looking,” Naglak said.
And she would not rule out another pharmacy.
“Rite Aid wanted us to sign a contract that the next tenant would not be a pharmacy, but we refused,” said Naglak.
“They kept saying ‘who is going to take care of me?’ It was very moving, very emotional and bittersweet.”
— Helen Clark, Care Capital Management
“Rite Aid wanted us to sign a contract that the next tenant would not be a pharmacy, but we refused.”
— Barbara Naglak, building owner