Opening a Medicare-Focused Insurance Agency Offers Benefits to Independent Pharmacies

At the American Associated Pharmacies (AAP) Annual Conference, held April 4 to 6 in San Diego, California, Drug Topics sat down with Joe McKamey, general manager at Marcrom’s Pharmacy in Manchester, Tennessee, to talk about why pharmacies should open their own Medicare-focused insurance agency and what steps and preparations they can take to ensure a successful launch and operation.

“Once we learned about it all and were able to offer the whole picture to somebody, we found that we were really able to help them a lot more,” McKamey said. “Now that I’m looking back on it, when we were only doing Medicare Part D reviews, we might have even been doing people a disservice. I just think it’s super important to be able to help these patients to maximize their benefits and we’re able to do that, we’re able to make sure they’re well taken care of.”

Opening an independent Medicare-focused insurance agency may seem like a difficult task for pharmacist’s in the current climate of harmful PBM practices and DIR fees, but McKamey said that it is ultimately a relatively simple process, it just takes time.

“The very first thing is to plan for that it’s going to take some time,” McKamey said. “I think the other thing that is super important is that pharmacies and pharmacy owners go into it with the mindset that it is its own business and so you want to treat it that way. If you treat it like it’s just an ancillary service, it’s probably not going to be worth your time. But if you treat it as its own business, potentially even hire a dedicated person to be your insurance agent, that’s when you’re going to be more successful.”

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