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“(The college) haven’t been able to present any objective evidence that says people are abusing that or that it is impacting their health in any way,” Stewart added.
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First thing I was thinking, the College needs to come forth with actual evidence that has people abusing their prescriptions, say do more pain prescriptions get refilled at Safeway pharmacies, and control to look for same population and how they dispense their medication from other pharmacies (Is overall health higher for x illness when dispensing from pharmacies without loyalty programs, etc.).
At the same time this quote:
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A sign at a Safeway pharmacy explains the company's opposition to a decision on the future of reward programs at pharmacies
“What we've found is patients are generally more adherent, they actually build stronger relationships with our pharmacists when these types of benefits are in place,” explains Chad Rieger of Safeway. “We found with Air Miles that we’ve actually seen an increase in frequency of fills, so patients are more adherent to their prescriptions or filling them when they should.”
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needs to be backed by evidence as well, does loyalty programs actual improve adherence to medications? It's a good study to tackle, problems with adherence is a big public health issue, leads to carriers of diseases, antibiotic resistance etc. It's one thing to get evidence that people fill their prescriptions more often when loyalty programs are in place, but do they actual then take the medication? If they aren't actually taking more medication, it's just a possible unfair competitive advantage for the pharmacy.