Hopefully the anti-trust regulators will start doing their job and rejecting these mergers. The only reason they should allow a deal like this to go through is if the company that is being bought is otherwise about to shut down. More competition is a good thing, just think how much worse shape the wireless industry would be in for consumers today if the T-Mobile AT&T merger had been allowed to go through.
The retail pharmaceutical market is crazy. The retail chains for years have been overrunning independent pharmacies. CVS and Walgreens are pretty much running everyone else out of business. The pharmacy services the chains provide is a joke compared what they should be doing, which is optimizing pharmatherapy- not just pumping out as many prescriptions as possible and screwing over poor, uninsured customers with drug costs that cost 3-10x+ the wholesale cost the drug.
The Pharmacy Benefit Manager industry is nuts. ExpressScripts and Medco were ever allowed to merge blew my mind. Now ExpressScripts(/Medco) and CVS/Caremark pretty much run the show. The biggest reason I hate CVS/Caremark has a vise on the the balls of the retail pharmacy. With Caremark, they make it very incentivized to only use CVS pharmacies or their mail order service, both supported by CVS's own wholesaler. Essentially, CVS has so much presence that drug manufactures have to give them the best deal otherwise CVS will call their bluff, not buy it, and severely affect the drug mfg. Thats why from time to time CVS will tell their customers "oh there is a mfg backorder (or recall)" .... when in fact the mfg would have had to report those facts to the FDA if that was the case (and be reported online on the FDA's website). So while its great that CVS wants to get the best price, they will screw their customers out of medication to make that happen.
I kept getting emails from some of the psychiatrists at my work trying to figure out how to get Abilify for our outpatient psych patients. CVS & WAG refused to stock the medication for up to two months before it went generic because they knew the $800/bottle drug would so fall to $10/bottle or whatever it is now. Some of these (very disabled) patients had to have their antipsychotics switched because its easier than trying to have a mentally disabled person or try and use a new pharmacy.
I actually called two CVS's and asked them if they had the medication. Both told me it was on MFG backordered, which was not the case according to the FDA website. The second pharmacist I spoke to at CVS, I asked "why is it not listed by the FDA as backordered?" He said "Oh, it's because its going generic so they're not making it" -- which is not the case either, Abilify will (and has) continued making the brand name drug alongside the generic. So CVS routinely lies/spreads misinformation to their employees and patients. When i had a internship/rotation with CVS retail in Pharmacy School, I found this happen way too frequently with all different drugs, some of them generic for decades and manufactured by a dozen+ manufactures.
$$$ > Care of Patient = Unethical (especially considering CVS's tremendous value).
