Forest Park Pharmacy

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Forest Park Pharmacy We are a new kind of pharmacy that offers fair and transparent pricing with no insurance required!

09/28/2026

When the opioid crisis was spiraling, people inside UnitedHealth's PBM said the obvious thing. Take OxyContin off the formulary.

It stayed on. According to internal Optum emails that surfaced in reporting on this, one manager wrote that Purdue had basically caused the opioid epidemic and covering the drug was rewarding that behavior. Another manager replied "valid point," and explained the company had looked into it, but the utilization and the rebates it collected prevented them from doing it.

That's the whole PBM business model in two emails.

People outside pharmacy usually don't realize rebates aren't a bonus. They're the price of admission. There's no brand name drug on a major formulary that isn't paying one. And a rebate is a percentage of the list price, so the PBM makes more when the price goes up and more when volume goes up. Per the reporting, Optum pushed Purdue from roughly 23% of each sale to about 60%. Did OxyContin get cheaper? No. A bigger rebate needs a bigger list price to pay for it.

Optum wasn't alone. A Barron's investigation found CVS Caremark, Optum Rx and Express Scripts together collected more than $400 million in rebates and fees from Purdue in a single 12-month stretch ending in late 2017. Caremark's deal reportedly doubled the rebate for plans that allowed four or more OxyContin pills a day instead of two. Express Scripts gave Purdue favorable formulary placement in exchange for a 40% rebate. Higher dose, bigger check.

Two Republicans and two Democrats in Congress sent a letter asking the Justice Department to investigate the PBMs' role in the opioid crisis.

This also answers a question I get constantly. Why does America pay the highest brand name drug prices in the world when our generics are some of the cheapest? Generics, about 90% of what gets filled, mostly compete on price. Brand drugs have to pay a middleman for access, and that payment gets baked into the price before the drug ever reaches you. The rebate system was sold as a way to lower costs. It raises them, and the people running it know that.

We don't take rebates. Nobody pays us for placement, and we don't make more when a price goes up. Cost of the drug plus a flat fee.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/27/2026

A mom posted her mail pile from the year after she had her baby. It's still coming. Every week another envelope from a medical group she's never heard of.

One says $2,000 with a QR code to pay. No itemization, no description of what it was for. Another says $2,021, and the first line on it reads "please note, this is not a bill." Then there's a $250 charge for a newborn hearing screening she declined, until staff told her the baby couldn't be discharged without it. She found out later that wasn't true.

A year after delivery, she's still trying to figure out what she's being asked to pay for.

We went through the exact same thing with ours. Letters every week, different names on every envelope, no idea where any of it came from. And we thought we had it all lined up before we left the hospital.

Picture any other business doing this. A contractor doesn't finish a $2,000 job and then mail you a QR code eight months later with no description of the work. They'd be gone. Hospitals and physician groups get away with it because you aren't their customer. Their income is reimbursement. The bill goes to the insurance company first, gets picked apart, gets kicked back, and whatever's left gets mailed to you months later with zero context.

Some of the names on those envelopes are worth looking up, too. One of her bills came from U.S. Anesthesia Partners. The FTC sued them in 2023, alleging a private equity roll-up that bought nearly every large anesthesia practice in Texas and used that dominance to raise prices, costing Texans tens of millions of dollars a year. USAP denies it and reached a settlement agreement in principle with the FTC this spring. A patient class action is still going.

You don't pick your anesthesiologist. You're asleep, or you're in labor. That's exactly why somebody would want to own all of them.

Congress tried to fix surprise bills with the No Surprises Act. A Georgetown study put the cost of its arbitration process at $22.4 billion since 2022, and that's now landing in premiums. Another fix aimed at the right problem that made the bill bigger.

The real fix is boring. Pay the provider directly and you become the customer. Customers get told the price before they buy. Customers get a receipt that says what they bought. Customers don't get a mystery envelope eleven months later.

That's how we run the pharmacy. No insurance in the middle, nothing showing up in your mailbox later. You see the price before you pay it.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/25/2026

Last June the Ohio Chamber of Commerce went to the statehouse and argued against Ohio's independent pharmacies. This month the Chamber sued UnitedHealth in federal court for doing to the Chamber exactly what those pharmacies had been describing.

Here's what the Chamber had in front of it at the time.

Ohio lost 215 pharmacies in 2024. Independents are down to about 300 statewide. In Meigs County nearly 40% of census tracts are pharmacy deserts. In Danville, CVS bought the only pharmacy in town and closed it. An elderly man told the librarian he couldn't walk the 12 miles to the next one.

Ohio also already knew what fixed it. The state caught CVS Caremark and OptumRx billing Medicaid $224 million more than they paid the pharmacies that dispensed the drugs. Medicaid fired them, set up one transparent PBM, paid pharmacies acquisition cost plus about $10 a script, and saved $140 million.

Pharmacies asked for that same deal on the commercial side. The Chamber's lobbyist said a dispensing fee would raise costs for employers and described PBMs as business-to-business entities that exist only because someone hires them. Asked whether independent pharmacies were also small businesses, he didn't answer directly. The woman who reopened a pharmacy in Danville is chair-elect of her county's chamber of commerce.

Now the lawsuit. The Chamber runs a health plan about 20% of its members use. It hired a UnitedHealth subsidiary as administrator, so United processed the claims and had access to the plan's data, employers and brokers. The Chamber alleges United stopped providing services with the contract still running, used that access to move employers onto United's own insurance, told them the Chamber plan was ending, withheld the Chamber's own data, and put the Chamber's logo on United marketing. Nine counts, including deceptive trade practices and breach of fiduciary duty. United's regional CEO says in writing that it rejects the allegations.

A business hired a vertically integrated giant to handle its claims, and the giant allegedly used that position to take its customers.
Pharmacies call that Tuesday.

UnitedHealth is the third-largest corporation in America by revenue. It owns the largest insurer, the most doctors' offices, and one of three PBMs that together control about 80% of covered prescriptions. Anyone doing business with a company like that is also competing with it.

Welcome to the club, Ohio Chamber.

We don't route anything through a middleman that competes with us. No PBM, no administrator holding our customer list. Cost plus a flat fee, posted up front.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.
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09/25/2026

A primary care doctor posted that Blue Cross Blue Shield hasn't paid her for an entire year of work. Her first year out of residency. The reason was a wrong ID number.

One digit. Twelve months of seeing patients, all of it unpaid.

Her denial category has a name in the industry. Eligibility errors are the single most common driver of denied claims, with 68% of practices reporting it as their primary problem. Three out of four denials on ACA plans come from administrative errors rather than any dispute about whether the care was necessary. Nobody is arguing she shouldn't have treated those patients. A field was typed wrong.

Initial denial rates hit 11.8% industry-wide. Roughly one in ten claims gets kicked back on first submission. Each one costs a practice somewhere between $25 and $181 in staff time to rework, and between 35% and 60% of denied claims never get resubmitted at all. Practices bleed 3% to 5% of net revenue this way.

And there's a clock on it. Every payer sets a timely filing deadline. Miss that window while you're fighting over the wrong ID number and the claim is dead. Not delayed. Dead. You did the work, you can't bill for it, and there's no appeal.

Ask yourself how many businesses survive a year of doing the work and collecting nothing.

But the part of her post that stuck with me was what she said about pricing. Patients ask her why something costs what it costs, and her honest answer is that she has no idea. She's not in charge of billing. She's not even getting paid. What she charges is irrelevant, because the only number that matters is what the insurance company decides to reimburse.

That's not a market. In a market, a buyer and a seller agree on a price. Here the seller doesn't know the price, the buyer doesn't know the price, and the only party who knows sits above both of them and pays out whatever it decides to pay, whenever it decides to pay it.

We keep sending all the money to the middle and trusting it to filter back down correctly. It doesn't. It gets held up over a typo for a year while a new doctor wonders if she can keep her doors open.

The fix isn't a better claims process. It's removing the party that controls the money.

That's what we did. We fired the middleman, so there's no ID number that can hold your prescription hostage, no reimbursement rate that decides our price, and nobody upstream sitting on our money. You see the cost of the drug plus a flat fee, before you pay.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/23/2026

More than twenty states have now sued the same nine companies over insulin prices. Florida filed this week. Texas, California, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, Delaware, Indiana, Massachusetts, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois and Arizona got there first.

Red states, blue states, and every single complaint describes the same scheme with the same defendants.

The defendants are always three manufacturers who make over 90% of the world's insulin, three PBMs who process roughly 80% of American prescriptions, and the rebate aggregators that sit between them. Florida named those too. Zinc, Ascent and Emisar, the offshore entities the rebate money gets routed through.

The mechanism, per Florida's complaint: manufacturers inflate the published list price, pay a cut back to the PBM, and get rewarded with preferred formulary placement. Both sides make more money every time the sticker price goes up. A Lilly executive testified that on a $280 vial of Humalog, roughly $210 goes back to the PBMs. That's 75% of the price of insulin functioning as a payment for permission to be covered.

Insulin costs around two dollars to manufacture.

If you want to know how locked in this is, look at what happened when somebody tried to break it. Novo Nordisk cut the list price of its insulin Levemir by 65%. Coverage for the drug collapsed from about 90% down to 35%. The PBMs dropped it because a cheaper drug pays them less. Novo discontinued it entirely.

Their CEO told a Senate committee in September 2024 that this is exactly why he won't cut list prices on his other drugs. His position was that a high list price is more likely to get patients access, because the middlemen only cover what pays them well. He also testified that 74 cents of every dollar the company brings in goes back to PBMs and insurers.

Sanders showed up to that hearing with written commitments from all three major PBMs promising they wouldn't drop coverage if Novo lowered prices. The CEO still wouldn't do it. He'd already learned what happens.

And the people who get charged against the inflated number are the ones with the least protection. Uninsured patients. People sitting in a deductible. Anyone on percentage coinsurance. The fake price was built to fund the rebate, and the patients with the worst coverage are the ones who pay it.

We don't take rebates. Nobody pays us for placement, and there's no list price to inflate because there's no middleman here to inflate it for. You pay what the drug costs plus a flat fee.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/23/2026

Your insurance company can count the machinery it uses to deny your care as money spent on your care.

Here's the rule that's supposed to prevent that. Under the ACA, insurers have to spend 80 to 85 cents of every premium dollar on actual medical care. It's called the medical loss ratio. They keep the rest for overhead and profit.

Medicare Advantage plans reported a medical loss ratio of almost 90% for 2023. Then the Insurance Watchdog Coalition went into those same plans' CMS filings and pulled out only the real medical and prescription claims. 82.5%. Below the legal minimum, and about $36 billion less than what got reported.

So what filled the gap? Per the report, the rules let plans count things that aren't medical care as if they were. Parts of prior authorization systems get classified as "quality improvement." Gym memberships count. Cash cards for everyday expenses count.

The apparatus that makes your doctor stop, fill out forms, and wait for permission to treat you gets filed in the same column as your treatment.

And that 82.5% still leaves something out. It doesn't break out what insurers pay the doctors, pharmacies and PBMs they own. UnitedHealth employs or is affiliated with around 90,000 physicians. CVS owns Aetna, Caremark, and its own clinics.

We don't have a medical loss ratio, because we don't have premiums. You pay for the medication plus a flat fee. There's nothing to reclassify.
forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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A hospital wanted $18,000 to remove a polyp. The same procedure in a doctor's office runs about $3,000.Her own professio...
09/21/2026

A hospital wanted $18,000 to remove a polyp. The same procedure in a doctor's office runs about $3,000.

Her own professional society, ACOG, says it can be done right in an office with local numbing. So she found an OB who agreed to do it that way. Took the two-week course of hormones to prep for it.

Day before the procedure, his office calls. He can't do it in the office anymore. Has to be at a freestanding surgery center owned by the same health system, because that system bought his practice in 2025. She walks in the next morning to surgical techs and OR nurses moving around a room she didn't need. Bill came to about $6,000.

Want to know what the procedure actually involved? She turned down the sedation entirely. Doctor numbed her cervix, removed the polyp in a few minutes. She called it a few seconds of cramping. She spent it watching the images and talking to the OR crew about snorkeling.

A few minutes of work, and three different prices depending on which room they put her in.

82% of physicians in this country now work for a hospital, an insurer, another corporate entity, or private equity. UnitedHealth alone employs around 10,000 primary care doctors and has another 80,000 affiliated. When somebody owns your doctor, they also own the decision about where your procedure happens.

Almost none of it gets reviewed. Mergers only trigger antitrust reporting above a dollar threshold, currently around $134 million. Yale researchers looked at more than 275 hospital acquisitions of physician practices and found over 99% fell below that line. It happens one small practice at a time until there's no independent left in your county.

And the results are measured. When Harvard researchers studied hospitals buying gastroenterology groups, prices went up, quality went down, complication rates rose. The one thing that got better was throughput. That's a financial number, not a medical one.

Same machine runs at the pharmacy counter. Your insurer owns the PBM, the PBM owns the specialty pharmacy, and you get routed to whichever one pays them most, whether or not it's cheapest or even has your drug in stock.

We're not attached to any of it. No insurer, no PBM, no parent company deciding where you're allowed to go. Cost plus a flat fee, posted before you pay.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/19/2026

A tweet went around this week saying it's hard to research healthcare without concluding that insurance companies are heroes. 2.5 million views. His argument was that somebody has to tell doctors no, and the insurance company is the one brave enough to do it.

The problem with that argument is that the insurance company is the doctor now.

UnitedHealth's Optum arm employs or is affiliated with more than 90,000 physicians. That's roughly one in ten doctors in this country working for a company that also owns an insurer and a PBM. CVS owns Aetna and Oak Street Health. Cigna, Humana, Elevance all have provider arms. The referee bought the team.

So who exactly is telling whom no?

A Health Affairs study published last November found UnitedHealthcare pays its own Optum-affiliated doctors about 17 percent more than it pays outside doctors for the same work. Not less. More. They're not holding the line on costs, they're routing money from one pocket to another and calling the higher number a negotiated rate.

Under the ACA, insurers have to spend 80 to 85 cents of every premium dollar on actual care. Their margin is capped as a percentage. Think about what that does to the incentive. If you can only keep 15 percent, the only way to make more money next year is for the whole pie to get bigger. Higher prices. More utilization. Bigger premiums.

They don't profit by saying no. They profit when the total goes up.

That's why costs never come down no matter how many "cost containment" programs get announced. A company whose profit is a fixed slice of total spending has no reason to shrink total spending. Shrinking it is the one thing that actually hurts them.

The guy who wrote that thread was looking at prior authorizations and denials and seeing discipline. What's actually happening is a company denying your claim on Monday and paying its own clinic a premium rate on Tuesday, with your premium funding both.

There's a version of this with nobody in the middle. We don't bill insurance. There's no PBM setting our price, no parent company we route money to, no incentive for our number to go up. We buy the drug, add a flat fee, and post it.

forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/19/2026

A guy looked at his urgent care bill and caught them.

Clinic said the visit was $1,200. Insurance took credit for negotiating it down. He checked his benefits. Insurance paid nothing. Zero. He paid $620 out of his own pocket.

So the $1,200 was made up. The savings were made up. The only real number in that whole transaction was $620, and it came out of his wallet after he'd already been paying premiums all year.

Nobody pays $1,200 for urgent care. A simple visit, a cough, a UTI, a refill, posts at $100 to $250 cash at most clinics. The $1,200 exists so the discount has something to point at. That's the only reason that number is on the page.

He could have walked into that same clinic, said nothing about insurance, and asked for the self-pay price. Most urgent cares will knock another 15 to 40 percent off for paying that day. He'd have been out maybe $150.

Instead he paid $620 for the privilege of watching a fake discount get applied to a fake price.

Call around before you go. Two or three places, ask what the visit costs cash, ten minutes on the phone. You'll know more about the price than anyone standing at that front desk will tell you.

Better option, look at direct primary care. Flat monthly fee, no insurance in the middle, a doctor who knows you and picks up the phone. That's what we do for our family.

The same trick runs at the pharmacy counter. Inflated price, invented discount, a copay with no relationship to what the drug actually costs.

We fired the people who inflate the number. Cost plus a flat fee, posted before you pay.

forestparkpharmacy.com, look at the price checker, transfer today to save.

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09/17/2026

A guy went viral this week telling people to use GoodRx to escape their insurance pricing. He is right that your insurance price is probably too high. He is wrong about what GoodRx is.

GoodRx does not negotiate anything. It surfaces prices that pharmacy benefit managers already set. The same PBMs that built the price you are trying to escape. Express Scripts, OptumRx, CVS Caremark, MedImpact, Navitus. GoodRx has contracts with all of them.

Follow the money on a GoodRx fill. You hand over the coupon. The pharmacy processes that claim through a specific PBM. The pharmacy then pays a per-prescription fee to that PBM. The PBM shares a slice of that fee back to GoodRx for sending you there. GoodRx has reported earning roughly 15% of your total prescription cost.

So the PBM gets paid when you use your insurance, and the PBM gets paid when you use GoodRx to get around your insurance. Both roads lead to the same building.

The scale of this is not small. In 2020 alone GoodRx accounted for about $3.4 billion in prescription revenue and collected nearly $500 million in fees from PBMs. Three out of four people using GoodRx already had insurance. They were paying premiums every month and still needed a coupon to afford their own medication.

Sit with the shape of that. You pay a PBM premiums all year. That PBM sets a price so high you cannot use it. Then a company funded by that same PBM shows you a different price the PBM also set, and the PBM collects a fee on that transaction too.

Express Scripts made GoodRx its exclusive discount card provider for commercial members. CVS Caremark runs its own version. These are not competitors sneaking around the PBMs. These are the PBMs opening a second register.

Industry analysts have been blunt about why the two prices exist at all. Different PBMs have different contracted rates, legacy contracts do not reflect current market pricing, and the same PBM offers different rates to different clients. If the cash rate were easy to see, employers would demand it. The confusion is the product.

GoodRx is better than overpaying, and if it is what you have, use it. I would rather someone save $40 than not. But understand you are not escaping the system. You are using the system's back door and paying a toll to the same people who locked the front one.

There is a version of this where none of it applies. No PBM, no coupon, no fee routed to anyone. We buy the drug and sell it to you at our cost plus a flat fee. The price is the price, and nobody in the middle gets a cut.

Head to forestparkpharmacy.com, look at the price checker, and see what your medication actually costs.

See ya.

Address

2410 Forest Park Boulevard
Fort Worth, TX
76110

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 6pm
Tuesday 9am - 6pm
Wednesday 9am - 6pm
Thursday 9am - 6pm
Friday 9am - 6pm
Saturday 10am - 2pm

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