CEO: Benefit issues behind CVS Caremark

NEW YORK – CVS Caremark Corp. President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Thomas M. Ryan says the company’s Caremark pharmacy benefit-management business had moved on from isolated service issues that had in part caused some client losses for 2010, Dow Jones Newswires reported.
“We talked enough about some of the service issues,” Ryan said earlier this month at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in New York. “They are behind us. … It’s fixed.”
CVS’ pharmacy-benefits business has been under the microscope since early November, when it said it lost a net $4.8 billion in 2010 contracts. At that time, some analysts renewed questions about the plausibility of the CVS Caremark business model, forged in a $27 billion merger in 2007.
CVS said then that the roots of the issue were problems with its marketing message and some isolated service issues.
Ryan noted that 98 percent of the company’s clients give Caremark a favorable rating.
Last month, CVS won a two-year contract with a Texas pension fund, which helped soothe some investor worries. &#8226