Pharmacists rail about state budget The hearing also covered veterans and nursing home issues By Christopher Clough News-Chronicle The public hearing that was going to cover several aspects of Gov. Scott McCallum's proposed 2001-03 state budget nearly turned into a one-subject show. About half of the 20 or so people that spoke in front of the Senate Health, Utilities and Veterans and Military Affairs Committee talked about the deleterious effect certain provisions of the budget would have on pharmacies. "The pharmacists were very well organized in Green Bay," Sen. Rod Moen, D-Whitehall and committee chair, said after the hearing at Brown County Library Tuesday. "We heard on nursing home issues, we heard from some mentally ill people, some veterans, but nearly half was dealing with the pharmacy issue." "There's a few areas of concern that would affect pharmacists, Medicaid recipients and seniors pretty drastically," said Jeff Kirchner, manager of Streu's Pharmacy in Green Bay. "There's three or four items in (the budget) that are so anti-pharmacy..." The main area of concern is proposed cuts in the Medicaid program that would result in about a 40 percent reduction in reimbursements to the pharmacies on prescriptions for Medicaid patients. The proposed cuts are similar to those that former Gov. Tommy Thompson put in the 1999-2001 budget until pressure from pharmacists and Medicaid recipients, and then state legislators, saw them removed. Kirchner said the Medicaid cuts would not directly prevent his or other small pharmacies from offering services like free delivery or specialty packaging, which dispenses pills into a partitioned case with days of the week marked on them so the patient knows what to take and when to take them. But Kirchner said the loss of the reimbursements would make any extra services financially unfeasible. "Many (drugstores) could even go out of business," he said, "especially the independent, one-man shops up north. Now (if that happens), patients will have to go 100 miles out of their way to get prescriptions." Kirchner and Moen said drugstores could possibly refuse to fill out Medicaid prescriptions because they would incur a loss doing so. Kirchner said the plan the governor is proposing would put an emphasis on people refilling prescriptions for chronic diseases by mail order, with independent drugstores taking one-time, emergency prescriptions only. "If that happens, I won't even know all the other prescriptions (patients) are on," Kirchner said, saying that would lead to difficulties with potential drug interactions that could be harmful or even fatal."