Pharmacy MAC Rights

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Kentucky PBM MAC rights

Statute KRS 304.17A-162 + 806 KAR 17:575

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 broadest in the country. Comprehensive list + the actual MAC for each drug, not conditioned on request or contract

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?
Electronic, searchable and sortable by drug name, NDC and GCN; must carry per-unit price, strength, effective date, update date; 120-day price history retained; weekly change log posted to the PBM's website with old and new price

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

How often must prices update?
review/adjust every 7 cal. days, use immediately; weekly push to pharmacies

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

How long do you have to appeal?
60 days ("the initial claim")

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

How fast must they answer?
10 cal. days
What must a denial tell you?
NDC of the appealed drug or a therapeutically equivalent drug of the same dosage, form and strength, + the named Kentucky-licensed wholesaler offering it at/below MAC on the date of fill

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?
Yes — network-wide AND retroactive to the initial date of service, same plan, with individual notice to every contracted pharmacy and a right for all of them to reverse and resubmit

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

What are the penalties?Unverified
[UNVERIFIED] — no figure in § 304.17A-162 or the KAR

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

Who enforces it?
Dept. of Insurance
Enacted / last amended
created 2013; am. 2016; KAR am. 2022

Work out your actual deadline

Kentucky gives you 60 days. The date that clock starts from is the part people get wrong, and it is usually earlier than they assume. Put your claim date in and get the calendar date back.

Calculate my deadline

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

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