Pharmacy MAC Rights

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Ohio PBM MAC rights

Statute Ohio Rev. Code § 3957.25 (formerly § 3959.111, renumbered eff. 30 Jun 2026)

Can you demand the MAC list?
Yes — sources within 10 days of any request + electronic access to updates

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, "readily available, accessible, and secure and that can be easily searched" (new 2026)

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

How often must prices update?
every 7 days; use within 1 b.d.

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

How long do you have to appeal?
21 days ("following 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?
investigated and resolved within 21 days
What must a denial tell you?
NDC + the identity of the national or regional wholesalers from whom the drug was generally available at/below the benchmark (the wholesaler requirement is new in 2026)

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?
Weak — "all situated pharmacies as determined by the pharmacy benefit manager" (the word "similarly" is genuinely missing since 2015); retroactive to the date the appeal was made

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

What are the penalties?
≤$15,000 per violation (§ 3957.10(C)(1))

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

Who enforces it?
Superintendent of Insurance
Enacted / last amended
2015; amended + renumbered 2026 (HB 229, eff. 30 Jun 2026)

Work out your actual deadline

Ohio gives you 21 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

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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