Pharmacists are beginning to feel the reimbursement pain

Welcome to the club pharmacy colleagues. Replace “prescriptions” with “patients”, and you get an accurate description of what doctors have been going through for years (expletives replaced in the quote):

So we already are giving away a valuable service for free rather than just machine-gunning Rx’s out and making the store some money. Here is where the insurance companies take a good natured thing that we do for society, and bend us over for it. Medicare Part D is forcing many of the smaller independents out of business. AWP-95% + 0.01 (here is your 1 cent dispensing fee, just hand the pills out in ziplock baggies with the drug/patient name written in sharpie on the outside).

So, stuck . . . between the Insurance companies and being the most benefit to society, we have painted ourselves in quite a corner. Our choices?
# Screw patient care, hammer out the Rx’s as fast as you can, and stay in business. Possibly [screw] up and kill someone in the process by a medication error.
vs
# Maintain patient care, be the most trusted profession, and flip burgers on the side because your store went out of business.
vs
# Charge for services, have patients go to corpo-chain X where they get treated like [garbage], but don’t have to pay the pharmacist for sorting out their pills because they dumped them all into a candy dish and forgot which ones is which.