We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Johnson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.
Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.
Since the 1980s, when insurance companies began paying prescription claims directly to pharmacies, uninsured patients have progressively paid more and more for prescription medications. This is a result of the unfair contracts signed between insurance carriers and the pharmacies themselves. Because of how the contracts are written, pharmacies are all but forced to charge uninsured patients exorbitant prices in order to maximize insurance payments on the insured patients. I witnessed this for the first 9 years of my career in every practice setting from retail to hospital to long-term care to oncology. I felt this was unethical at its core – why should an insurance company be able to dictate a price for an uninsured patient? That’s how MedSavers Pharmacy came about. I thought there had to be a better way and that way was to kick insurance companies to the curb and not engage in a single contract with any of them. That way, I could charge a fair price to any patient that walked through my door, unencumbered by some crazy insurance contract. On April 11, 2005, I opened the doors to MedSavers Pharmacy and so began the road to helping tens of thousands of patients across Texas. I began by charging 70-90% less than traditional pharmacies on the same FDA-approved generics that the other pharmacies carried. Heck, I even had the same driver from the same McKesson warehouse as many of the chain pharmacies. We were actually getting the exact same medications with one huge difference – I didn’t price gouge my patients. I took on the philosophy that profit was a good thing – obscene profit was, well, obscene. It was such a novel concept that we were picked up by multiple media outlets including newspapers, television, radio, authors and even Playboy magazine (wrote a story referencing us in the forum section). I had and continue to have pharmacists calling me from all over the country enquiring about what I do, how I do it and how much they would like to do it too. My answers are always the same: If you do this for the right reasons, you’ll succeed. If you do it for the money or notoriety, expect to fail. Over the years, I’ve seen a dozen or so pharmacies like MedSavers come and go. A few have survived. I believe we will continue to be successful as we have built loyal relationships with our customers. They trust us. They want to talk to us. That goes a long way in healthcare these days. People want to be heard and respected. They get that and more at MedSavers and I have no plans of changing it. Finally, those that have been taken advantage of the most have a place where they are treated fairly. Our mission has held true for 18 years now – we make medications affordable for those without insurance.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Crazily enough, my father was a pharmacist but I never considered pharmacy as a profession until 2 years into my college education. I entered The University of Texas at Austin in 1989, focusing on a finance and business as a major. My biggest problem was how traditional business was being taught (I’ll return to this point later). In a nut shell, I was bored with my education. This prompted me to take an extensive career evaluation questionnaire which pointed me toward medicine. I knew I didn’t want to spend 8 to 12 years in college so I settled on pharmacy. Time went by quickly and graduation came in 1995. My career as a pharmacist was born. Through the first 9 years of my career, I worked in over 80 different pharmacies of multiple disciplines including retail, hospital, long-term care, research, oncology, and an in-patient residential center for adolescents. All the while, the story was the same: uninsured and underinsured patients always got a raw deal with payment – in essence, I learned that these patient subsets helped subsidize pharmacy profits – all due to the contracts signed with insurance companies. That never sat well with me but took some years to fully understand that there could be a better way. What if a pharmacy just decided not to sign ANY insurance contracts, allowing for a fair price structure for those without insurance? In the spring of 2005, I decided to do just that and MedSavers was born. My mission was to provide uninsured and underinsured patients with affordable medication. It was such a simple concept! I shifted paradigms, deciding that MedSavers could exist, take care of my family and help a bunch of people in the process. The basic business and economic concepts being taught in college were simple supply and demand models – charge what the market can bare. Well, I decided to charge enough to pay bills and feed my family, even though I could have charged much more and still make medications affordable. What would our world look like if business was taught this way? Profits are a good thing. Obscene profits are . . . well . . . obscene. It’s now 2023 and we have served tens of thousands of patients in Texas. MedSavers is strong. I love what I do. It’s hard to imagine my career being anything but what it is today and I can’t wait to help even more people as we continue to grow.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When the Affordable Care Act came along in 2010, I had mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was thrilled to see one of the biggest problems in our society being addressed. At the same time, it was this very problem of insurance and unaffordable health care that made MedSavers a successful venture. Business dropped off the first year like it never had and I had to pivot. I visited a colleague close by about her eventual retirement and the possibility of buying her pharmacy when that day came. As it turned out, she was ready and we spent the better part of a year figuring out the terms of the purchase. The reason I was interested is because she had a small compounding operation (making custom prescription medications from raw ingredients) and I had been interested in adding this aspect to MedSavers for a couple of years leading up to this acquisition. The purchase was complete and I immediately started growing that aspect of my business. Most insurance companies do not cover compounded medications. I believed that most pharmacies involved in compounding charged way too much which tied directly to my mission. Now, Austin and central Texas had a pharmacy that provided affordable compounding medications. The pivot from only providing commercial medications to now providing commercial and compounded medications provided a springboard to another revenue stream. This offset the decline of business after the passing of the ACA and MedSavers’ growth resumed.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
I love talking about this part of my story. It’s what I talk to students about the most every time I guest speak at the pharmacy school. It’s also what I try to drive home with my own kids as they venture into their own college experiences and eventual careers. Here it is: Opportunities will inevitably cross your path throughout your life. Often, taking advantage of these opportunities boils down to basic preparedness. Speaking directly about pharmacy, young graduates often make immediate purchases with their newfound incomes – houses, cars, vacations, etc. This typically handcuffs the new pharmacists as they now have more debt and financial obligations that hinder their ability to take advantage of opportunities when they appear. So, my advice is always the same; live modestly, especially in the beginning. Make sure you save money for future endeavors so that opportunities don’t pass you by. For me, it was opening MedSavers – I financed it fully by myself. I was able to do this because I put back money all along the way, knowing that such an opportunity would come along. I have 10 other examples where this has happened in my career, including having another business in 1999-2000, acting quickly on buying houses, cars, a duplex and a condo, and even fully paying for the acquisition of another pharmacy in 2011.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.medsaverspharmacy.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medsaverspharmacy/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/medsaverspharmacy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-johnson-78235947/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/medsavers
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/medsavers-pharmacy-austin