For some New Yorkers, pharmacies are few and far between
By Julia Ingram
May 1, 2022
While it may seem like there is a CVS or Walgreens every few blocks in parts of Manhattan, easy access to drugstores isn't the case across the state, or even the city. Most counties in New York have only one or two pharmacies for every 10,000 people — and the state's least populous county doesn't have any at all.
An estimated 41 million Americans live a "pharmacy desert," according to a September 2021
analysis by GoodRx, a drug price comparison tool. GoodRx defined someone as living in a pharmacy desert if they live at least 15 minutes by car from the three closest pharmacies to them.
In New York, 1.3 million people — roughly 7% of the state's population — live in pharmacy deserts, according to GoodRx's data. And an analysis of state and Census data representing 86% of pharmacies shows that census tracts where a majority of the population identifies as Native American or in tracts where a majority identifies as Black have fewer pharmacies per 1,000 people than in other tracts.
Research has also found racial disparities in pharmacy access in Chicago. A 2014
study found that pharmacy deserts were more prevalent in majority-Black or majority-Hispanic census tracts in Chicago. A 2021
study by one of the same authors found that between 2015 and 2020, pharmacies in Black and Latino neighborhoods in New York City and three other cities were likely to offer immunization and drive-through services or stay open 24 hours than pharmacies in other neighborhoods.
The study also found these pharmacies were more likely to have closed in the five-year period it looked at. Some pharmacy locations shuttered during the pandemic: 70 Duane Reade stores closed in NYC in 2020, a
report by the Center for an Urban Future found.
But the pandemic isn't why some independent pharmacies have been forced to close, according to the Pharmacist Society of the State of New York. Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the entities that negotiate on prescription drug prices with insurance companies and reimburse pharmacies for the cost of the medicine, frequently don't reimburse at a rate that covers the medication — which provides a greater challenge for independent pharmacies than large chains.
In June, bills signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul will go into effect
requiring that PBMs be licensed and disclose the terms required for pharmacies in their network. The legislation also tasks the state's department of financial services with regulating them.
Methodology
The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) dataQ database is the primary data source used in academic research around pharmacy access and pharmacy deserts, but it is a proprietary dataset that costs $9,000 to access. In lieu of that, data on individual pharmacies participating in the NY State Office of Mental Health's Medication Grant Program, which provides funding for reimbursing medications for mental illness, was used. The pharmacies participating in the program represents 86% of the state's pharmacies, according to county-level counts published by the New York State Office of the Professions.
Data on racial or ethnic majorities in census tracts was calculated from the most recent American Community Survey. The differences between the average number of pharmacies per 1,000 people in each racially or ethnically segregated tract were found to be statistically significant. For more details on the results of statistical tests, see the Github repository.