By QUINTON SMITH/Lincoln Chronicle
The imminent departure of two Rite Aid pharmacies in Newport and Lincoln City has added some urgency to potential plans by Samaritan Health Services to open its second pharmacy in Lincoln County.
The bankruptcy and store closure announcement by Rite Aid last week will leave Lincoln County with two less pharmacies in an area already struggling to provide that service for 50,000 residents and an aging population with a growing number of retirees.
Rite Aid has pharmacies inside its Newport and Lincoln City stores. When Rite Aid closes it will leave the county with four retail pharmacies in Newport, three in Lincoln City and one in Waldport.
- In Newport, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Walgreens and Walmart have pharmacies in their stores, and there is a standalone Genoa Pharmacy, which is owned by United Healthcare.
- In Lincoln City, there are pharmacies in Walgreens and Safeway stores.
- In Waldport, Vancouver, Wash. based Hi-School Pharmacy has a store with a pharmacy that serves much of south Lincoln County.
Samaritan opened a full-service pharmacy on the campus of its Lincoln City hospital in January after the Bi-Mart retail chain ending its pharmacy services.
Megan Jones, Samaritan’s Corvallis-based director of outpatient pharmacy services, said she was already discussing the idea of opening a pharmacy in Newport when Rite Aid made its announcement May 5.
“We’d love to put a pharmacy in Newport,” Jones told Lincoln Chronicle. “We’re looking for a place.”
Given the success of its new Lincoln City pharmacy, Jones said she has been talking to Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital chief executive officer Lesley Ogden about a location, although not necessarily on the Newport hospital’s campus.
“Then things like this Rite Aid announcement happens that add urgency to those discussions,” she said.
In addition to Lincoln City, Samaritan recently opened pharmacies on the Oregon State University campus and in Sweet Home.
Jones said that Oregon ranks 49th nationwide per capita on access to pharmacies and that the situation is even worse in most parts of rural Oregon, including Lincoln County.
“We are in a ‘pharmacy desert’ that particularly hits rural areas harder,” she told Lincoln Chronicle. “It doesn’t feel like there are enough pharmacies. People are not getting the service they’re used to.”
Second bankruptcy
Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy May 5 for the second time in less than two years and said it will begin the process over the next few months of closing or selling its remaining 1,240 stores.
The company has 48 stores across Oregon. A store in Florence was closed in the first wave of cuts last year.
In a letter accompanying the filing, Rite Aid indicated that its stores won’t be open for too much longer. And in a separate letter to vendors, Rite Aid said it “has generally stopped purchasing goods and services.”
While it’s pharmacies in Newport and Lincoln City are still operating, shelves at the two stores are half-full.
Pharmacy chains such as Rite Aid and its rivals including Walgreens and CVS have been under pressure as falling drug margins, reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid and competition from Walmart and Amazon have led to the closure of hundreds of stores.
The store closures have exacerbated concerns about the emergence of “pharmacy deserts” — areas where residents lack access to a local pharmacy to fill their prescriptions, leaving them without a convenient and reliable source for essential medications, according to U.S. lawmakers and trade groups including the National Community Pharmacists Association.
Coastal closure issues
Jones knows about pharmacy closures.
She worked for Bi-Mart as a pharmacist, pharmacy manager and regional pharmacy manager overseeing 21 locations, including Lincoln City, from 2006 to 2022.
Jones said she saw “firsthand the changes in the pharmacy landscape” with declining Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement, increasing fees, and then Oregon’s corporate activity tax.
“When Bi-Mart executives made the decision to exit the pharmacy market, I was devastated,” Jones said in an email. “We served a lot of amazing rural communities like Lincoln City and my heart ached for those communities that lost such fundamentally necessary services.”
Jones said there are challenges with establishing pharmacies in rural areas, especially after the struggles during Covid pandemic that led many pharmacists to leave customer-facing work.
“Samaritan doesn’t want to take over the pharmacy world, but healthy communities are part of our mission,” she said. “We’re really looking at what we can do to fill these gaps and take care of patients.”
- Quinton Smith is the editor of Lincoln Chronicle, formerly YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
There are also Genoa pharmacies operating in Lincoln county.