Correction: In yesterday’s GPhA Buzz, we asked you to “Nominate someone (yourself?) for the GPhA Board.” It should have read “…to the GPhA Board.” We apologize for the grammatical error.*

Happy birthday!

Welcome to the new Cannon Drugs in Chickamauga — opened just this week and co-owned by GPhA members Neal and Carolyn Florence and Heather Staton!

Help your patients return unneeded meds

We realize most pharmacies can’t take back unused medication, but there are two easy ways to suggest to your patients:

1. Mix it with used cat litter (or something equally disgusting) and throw it out.
2. Check out www.PrescriptionDrugDisposal.com for an interactive Georgia map:

Pretty slick, huh?

It’s the other guy

Lawmakers: We all agree that high drug prices are a problem!

[Crowd cheering]

Lawmakers: We’re going to solve it for our constituents!

[Crowd cheering]

Lawmakers: We’re in this together!

[Crowd cheering]

Lawmakers: Of course our party are the noble warrior heroes, and the other side of the aisle is full of demons spawned from the depths of Hell….

[Bickering commences.]

It also does windows

Anthem promises that its new PBM, IngenioRx, will be friendly, transparent, give rebates back to patients, simplify services … all while saving Anthem customers $4 billion a year, and, we assume, curing bad breath and providing world peace.

Pharma’s in his blood I guess

Pharma Bro™ Martin Shkreli is apparently still running his, um, pharma empire from prison. The Wall Street Journal reports he was using a smuggled cell phone* and “remains the shadow power at Phoenixus AG, the drug company that became a national lightning rod for jacking up the prices of rare drugs under its former name, Turing Pharmaceuticals.”

There oughta be a law….

A 6-year-old boy in Oregon contracts tetanus. Spends 54 days suffering in the hospital (47 in the ICU, sedated in the dark with a tracheostomy and on a ventilator), plus 17 days in rehab. Parents still refuse to vaccinate him against tetanus or any other disease.

Medicare-for-All: How would you do it?

Republicans and Democrats agree* that it’s not a bad idea to let a lot more people buy into Medicare. But the devil is in the details — what would that look like? An alternative to employer plans? A replacement? How would premiums work?

You get the idea: Choices, choices, choices. Why not read what the experts think while you play “Build Your Own ‘Medicare for All’ Plan” from the Times?

* Yes, really. A whopping 69% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats support Medicare buy-in plans for adults 50 and older.