Pharmacy MAC Rights

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Alaska PBM MAC rights

Statute AS 21.27.945 (list) · AS 21.27.950 REPEALED eff. 1 Jan 2025 (HB 226, ch. 61 SLA 2024) · AS 21.27.953 (regulation mandate)

Read this one carefully. The research turned up something about this state that could mislead you if skimmed — usually a repeal, a renumbering, or a stale official page. The detail is in the fields below.

Partly unverified. At least one field below could not be confirmed against primary text. Those fields say so. We would rather show the gap than fill it.

Can you demand the MAC list?
Yes — the PBM must provide the list free of charge plus ready access

Whether the statute gives a pharmacy a right to see the list of drugs priced off maximum allowable cost.

What format must it be in?
Searchable electronic, computer-accessible, with the NDC, NADAC, WAC and reimbursement amount for each drug — after Kentucky, the most prescriptive format mandate in the country

Some states require it to be electronic and searchable. Most say nothing, which in practice means a PDF.

How often must prices update?
7 b.d.; 1 b.d. after a significant price update (±10% acquisition cost, methodology change, or a change in a variable)

A demonstrably staler list is itself a violation in most states.

How long do you have to appeal?Unverified
⚠️ NONE — the appeal statute was repealed 1 Jan 2025. AS 21.27.953 now only directs the insurance director to "adopt regulations" requiring PBMs to hear pricing appeals; [UNVERIFIED] whether any such regulation has been adopted

Read the trigger carefully. A clock running from adjudication is much shorter in practice than one running from payment.

How fast must they answer?
none in force (was 10 cal. days pre-repeal)
What must a denial tell you?
none in force (pre-repeal required NDC and wholesaler name)

The strongest provision in this area. A named drug code, and better a named wholesaler, is a claim you can check against your own catalogue.

Does winning fix it for everyone?
n/a (pre-repeal: appealing pharmacy's paid claims only)

In a few states a successful appeal corrects the price for every similarly situated pharmacy, sometimes retroactively.

What are the penalties?
≤$10,000/violation; ≤$25,000 willful; + disgorgement + license action

The weakest column in our data. Several are marked unverified rather than guessed at.

Who enforces it?
Division of Insurance
Enacted / last amended
§ 945 am. 2024 (HB 226); § 950 repealed eff. 1 Jan 2025

Before you rely on a deadline, know which plan is behind the claim

State MAC rights are strongest on commercial claims — individual plans, fully insured employer plans, and in many states the state employee plan. For self-funded employer plans they stand, because the Supreme Court's 2020 Rutledge decision specifically upheld MAC update and appeal mandates.

Medicare Part D is the real problem. Federal law expressly supersedes state regulation of Part D plans, two federal circuits apply that rule at very different levels of generality, and in Arkansas a federal court entered final judgment that the state MAC law is preempted as to Part D. Part D is roughly a quarter of a typical independent's volume, so this is not a footnote.

Medicaid depends entirely on your own state's statute — some exempt it by name, some cover it by name, most are silent. TRICARE and federal-employee claims should be treated as outside these rights.

What to do with this

  1. Check your own contract first. In most states it has to name the pricing sources the PBM uses. That is a document you already have.
  2. Ask for the list. There is a free template here. No state publishes one, so we wrote it.
  3. Send it to the right place. Sixty-odd licensed PBMs collapse to about eight actual appeal endpoints. Here is where each one goes.
  4. Tell us what happened. Nobody publishes whether these duties are actually honoured. Two minutes, and it becomes public data.

Sources

Spotted something wrong on this page? Tell us and we will check it — corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends us.

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