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Kaup Pharmacy will open a new pharmacy inside Wagner's IGA in Minster sometime in the summer.
MINSTER - To fulfill a community need, Kaup Pharmacy will open a new pharmacy inside Wagner's IGA at 257 E. 4th St., Minster.
"When Schwieterman's closed, Wagner's is kind of the hub of the community," grocery owner Leo Braido said. "Grocery people who are the most successful are the ones who start with the customer and look backward. What I heard from my customers was not about groceries, (but), 'We need a pharmacy.' My mission was to bring a pharmacy back to Minster. Fortunately, we were able to work with the Kaups, It's going to be great. This is the best thing that's happened to me since I've been here (for a little over three years)."
Braido said because the area is in a pharmacy desert from St. Marys to Sidney, he researched independent pharmacies when several closed.
"I did some research and found out, by far, the independent pharmacy of the area with the strongest, rich heritage was Kaup. We were fortunate enough, after a lot of discussions, to be able to have them come and kind of set up shop here. We're super excited."
Jill Andrews, vice president of Kaup Pharmacy, and her husband Jason own and operate branches in Fort Recovery, Union City and Berne, both in Indiana. Another separate branch is in Versailles.
The pair took over in 2024 from her parents Lorraine and Gerald Kaup, who founded the business on Nov. 10, 1980.
"Leo asked us if we would come to Minster," Andrews said. "Pharmacy is interesting and ever-challenging. He's been a big part of trying to get us here."
The pharmacy will rent a space inside Wagner's IGA near the front quadrant of the grocery store, where patrons could then pick up prescriptions and utilize other pharmacy services. Andrews hopes the operation will be up and running by this summer.
Kaup Pharmacy will open a new pharmacy inside Wagner's IGA in Minster sometime in the summer.
Customers were upended and left scrambling when Schwieterman Pharmacies shuttered its remaining locations in New Bremen, Minster and Coldwater on Dec. 31, 2024.
All pharmacies, not just the independents but the chain operations, too, are facing headwinds from pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), who run prescription drug coverage for insurers, large employers and other clients, Schwieterman Pharmacy owner Dale Bertke of Minster asserted in a December interview with The Daily Standard.
For years, PBMs have been the target of ire for politicians, patients and others. But PBMs have said they play an important role in controlling drug costs and pass along most of the discounts they negotiate to their clients.
PBMs set up formularies, or lists of covered drugs, and negotiate rebates off the drug prices.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said he is leading a bipartisan coalition of 39 attorneys general in urging members of U.S. Congress to engage in meaningful debate and reform of the current practices of PBMs.
"PBMs were originally intended to reduce the financial burden on Americans for prescription drugs, the reality today is starkly different," Yost said in a statement. "Instead of prioritizing the interests of patients, PBMs have shifted their focus to maximizing profits and marginalizing local pharmacies from the marketplace."
The problem with PBMs has been going on for years, and pharmacy deserts have since emerged all over Ohio, Bertke said, recalling a conversation he said he had with the aforementioned representatives.
"I had told them at that time that if I had to close our stores, there is nobody between Celina and Sidney," he said. "That's 42 miles, one way. The people in the middle of there are going to be devastated. They're going to have to travel 20-30 minutes to get to a pharmacy, one way, wait on their prescription and then travel back."
That scenario became a reality.
"This is not fair to them. This is not fair to the public," Bertke continued. "This is really denying public access to health care, and … this needs to be addressed. If you're in a big city, yeah, you can just maybe walk down three blocks and get your prescriptions. But that's not how it works in rural America."
Braido and Andrews just might have hit on a solution for one small corner of the region's pharmacy desert.
