TheVoiceOfJoyce The NashVillager is providing valuable information on the RX BILL before the Tennessee Legislature. They want to cut out the Pharmacy middleman and make Drugs Cheaper. CVS, owns Aetna , generic drugs and the intermediary the Pharmacy Benefit Manager. They’re making a profit through Vertical integration and these entities should be dissolved to avoid conflicts of interest and higher prices to consumers. Oppose CVS and ask your Legislators to vote for this bill .

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Monday, March 30, 2026Good morning! Catherine Sweeney

I love writing for the NashVillager newsletter to make a case for our stories and why you should care about them.  

Here’s why you should care about our ongoing coverage of the Fair R-X Act. That’s the bill that’s aiming to cut down on vertical integration in health care. (I’ll dive into it more below.) 

Tennessee is really harping on health care this year at the statehouse.  

Rising health care costs have been a hot-button issue for decades. But politicians tend to do a lot of lip service here. A bit of style, not a lot of substance. 

But lawmakers this year in Tennessee are getting into the nitty gritty.  

That nitty gritty includes: 

➡️  Reworking the requirements providers have to meet to open hospitals and other health facilities, and  

➡️  Working to give nurse practitioners and physicians assistants more authority so they can fight physician shortages in rural areas 

Regardless of your position on these specific policies, seeing this big picture shift is interesting. And it’s worth following.  

WHAT TO KNOW

In this May 30, 2019 photo, a CVS store with the new HealthHUB is shown in Spring, Texas. Photo: David J. Phillip / AP

I bet you’ve seen the flood of CVS ads going around — on TV, on social media, maybe even in your texts. They warn that unless you tell your rep to spike this bill, you could lose your neighborhood pharmacy. 

The chain has spent more than $1 million on those ads so far. 

They all say to call your reps and oppose a bill. It doesn’t explain what the bill does or why its passage would mean the closure of 134 CVS pharmacies across the state. 

It’s all about the Fair RX Act, or Tennessee Senate Bill 2040. This bill would regulate PBMs. 

PBM stands for pharmacy benefit manager. That’s a type of  corporation that handles drug negotiations. They’re like middlemen who work with pharmaceutical companies, insurerers and pharmacies, helping decide who pays what. 

These companies are controversial for a long list of reasons we don’t need to get into here. But a primary one: the companies are often owned by the same corporations as the pharmacies they’re negotiating with. 

CVS is in that boat. Its parent company owns a huge PBM, CVS Caremark, which manages prescription plans on behalf of 90 million Americans. And that parent company owns the huge insurer Aetna. And the CVS pharmacy chain. And the chain of Minute Clinics. And small specialty pharmacies that sell rare drugs. 

The Fair RX act would say: In Tennessee, you have to pick. Own a PMB or a pharmacy. You can’t have both. Its supporters point to CVS as a prime example of why. 

A state audit found the company was engaging in some questionable practices. Like getting insurance companies to pay CVS pharmacies five times more for the same drugs that other pharmacies sell. 

CVS says that because of national contracts, it has to own and operate its PBM in all 50 states. So if it had to pick, it would close its pharmacies in Tennessee, as well as its clinics within those pharmacies. And they say that’s why patients should ask lawmakers to kill the measure. 

Lawmakers supporting the bill basically say CVS is just playing hardball trying to protect its bottom line. They say that PBMs like the ones CVS owns drive up the cost of drugs for everyone, and that this measure could start reining them in. Especially if other states follow suit. 

The Fair RX act made it to the Senate floor last week. It’s still in committee in the House. 

Read or listen to a deeper dive into this Fair RX act. 

The NashVillager is supported by

and Nashville Public Radio members

On today’s episode of the NashVillagerpodcast with host Nina Cardona 🎙️ 

How do things change when Tennessee’s General Assembly is gearing up to adjourn? There are a few telltale signs when state lawmakers are ready to wrap up and head home for the year. Plus the local news for March 30, 2026, and HealthQ takes on GLP1s. 

Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcasting app
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MORE TO KNOW

  • It will be an emotional day across Montgomery County as students return to class for the first time since a fatal bus crash.The collision on Friday killed two Kenwood Middle School students and hospitalized several others. The Kenwood bus was transporting 25 students and five adults to a field trip in Jackson when it collided with a dump truck on Highway 70 in Carroll County. The Tennessee Highway Patrol says it will take a substantial investigation to know exactly what happened.
  • The third series of “No Kings” events were planned in over 3,000 cities, from major metropolises to small towns, including about 40 locations across Middle Tennessee. Thousands of people marched the streets of downtown Nashville, seemingly similar showings to the last protest in October. Reporter Caroline Eggers went to Ashland City, a town with about 5,600 residents, where a smaller crowd of people gathered on Saturday. “Congress has laid down and quit, so what do you do? You come out here and you protest,” said Carl “Vip” Vipperman, who lives in Kingston Springs. 
  • A new Vanderbilt Poll says confidence in Nashville leaders has slipped, WPLN’s Cynthia Abrams reports. The report says “the storm and its aftermath zapped the optimism that city residents have enjoyed for the past decade, and respondents also expressed more concerns about Nashville’s direction and leadership.” 
  • Metro has set a deadline for storm debris collection. All limbs, stumps and sticks need to be on the curb by April 19. Nashville Department of Transportation crews are on their second round of pickups, and the city says the third pass will be its last. After that, regular quarterly brush collection will resume.  

FROM WNXP

Nashville’s Ovven financed his fantastic new album, “Gnawing at the Cord,” one broken dryer at a time.

With money from his work as an appliance repairman, he hired an in-demand producer and made a guitar-laden alt-country record that dads around the country will hear and say, “Hell yeah.” 

The guitars are fuzzed out, the hooks are big, the pedal steel is tasteful. Lyrically, Owen Burton is observational: singing about fantasy football. Nostalgic: remembering guys who got into memorable scrapes on his block. And he finds himself settling into an embrace of classic rock. 

A big part of Burton’s journey on this record is accepting and embracing his identity as a white guy in his late 20s, but with old-man tendencies, it means embracing classic rock. That’s something that clicked for him in an instant while he was watching Led Zeppelin in his friend’s basement.

Explore more about Ovven and listen to some tracks.CHECK OUT TICKET GIVEAWAYS

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