A Different Kind of Drug Dealer

It's a huge thing for my kids to be able to look up to, to grow up with, to see what we're doing, to see some of the sacrifices that we made. I don't want them to just know me as a pharmacist. You know, I want them to know me as a dad that is really able to help people. Med Savers was born out of a lot of years of frustration. Our vision is really to help as many uninsured and under-insured patients that we can. And we do that by not dealing with the insurance companies and not signing those contracts which dictate what we charge an uninsured patient. It's over half your time as a pharmacist is spent dealing with insurance problems. I can take that time now and focus on the patients. A patient came down because she was on medication where she was cutting her tablets in half because she couldn't afford them. So I was able to sit down with this patient and say, you know, "Listen, when you cut this drug in half, you're never even reaching a therapeutic dose. So you don't even get any benefit. It's like you took nothing at all." And then when she found out she could be 70, 80, 90,% cheaper buying it through me, her whole life turned around. All of a sudden, her blood pressure was under control. Her diabetes was under control. And it was under control because she could afford it. For that story there's a hundred more. A social enterprise is a organization that creates public value. But unlike nonprofit organizations that create public value, social enterprises have a second feature, which is they have to be financially sustainable, scalable, and innovative. There are people that do need their medications. There are people that can't afford their medications. The only way for me to stay open and to provide those medications at an affordable price is to make a profit on them. And so my basic philosophy kind of boils down to this. Sure, profit is necessary to keep your lights on. It's necessary to keep your business running. But there's a difference between charging and making a profit, versus charging and making an obscene profit. There's a lot of medications I could charge three, four, five, maybe even ten times what I charge on it, but it wouldn't feel right to me. The vast majority of public problems lend themselves well to an experimental and innovative approach. For you to be a real social entrepreneur, you have to have broader goals, bigger claims, that your idea, your innovation, is going to spread and get bigger. There's room for these type pharmacies all over the state, all over the United States. You could have one in every major city. You know, I'm just one little guy. I can't go open ten stores tomorrow, but there are other you know people out there that if they could make that paradigm shift, that more of these opportunities could be taken advantage of, and a lot of people could be helped in the process. Probably the biggest hurdle was finding anybody that would believe in what I thought was a good idea. I didn't have a whole lot of people in my corner, you know, cheering me on. My wife was there. You know, Brenda is a social worker, and it was kind of her social work background, along with my pharmacy background, that really solidified this idea. Pharmacists are very well compensated in the United States, and so I think it's really difficult for a typical pharmacist to say, you know, "I'm going to go to a negative income for maybe a few years even, to try to make things work." And you know, job satisfaction, there's no price tag on that. And what you do in life and how you treat people and how you help people. There's nothing that I can say, there's no amount of money that's worth. If you can do that every day with what you do, in my mind, you're already a success.