Why CVS?
With some $76 billion in annual revenues, 6,800 stores, 500 retail clinics and an affiliated pharmacy benefits management component, CVS is the country’s biggest drugstore chain and largest provider of prescriptions. It leads rival Walgreens by most market measures, and is far ahead of the only other national drugstore chain, Rite Aid.
This growth has come at a high price for many of the communities in which CVS operates, despite the company’s mission “to improve the lives of those we serve by making innovative and high-quality health and pharmacy services safe, affordable and easy to access.” According to the results of a 14-month investigation, CVS actually fails to provide equal and fair access to its services based on analyses of several key measures:
Nationwide, CVS locates many more of its stores in the whitest communities, proportionally, than in areas where people of color predominate. And, in several key markets, CVS stores in lower income areas and communities of color are more likely to violate local health codes than stores in affluent or mostly white areas.
Regardless of location, CVS has been found to charge higher prices than its competitors in several markets, and has repeatedly been found charging more than posted or advertised prices. The company has been caught stocking expired baby formula and out of date-medicines at many of its stores, and a number of CVS store-brand medications are made by third-party vendors who operate foreign factories that the FDA seldom inspects. CVS’s products and vendors have repeatedly faced regulatory action because of potential impurities or other quality control lapses.
CVS has also abused customer trust by exposing private patient information to the risk of identity theft, by selling patient data to other companies and by exploiting intimate personal data for its own profit. In addition, CVS runs its pharmacies in ways that emphasize speed and profit, potentially compromising its dedicated pharmacists’ ability to care for patients.
Taken together, these practices amount to a sickness at CVS. But if CVS is sick, the sufferers are CVS customers. It is time for the communities ailing from CVS’s failures to band together and cure CVS. Read more about the issues we ask the company to address, and what other people are doing to Cure CVS.
