Recent SCOTUS Ruling on Rutledge v. PCMA Will Embolden Other Legislative Activity

Pharmacy Times^® interviewed Brian Nightengale, president of Good Neighbor Pharmacy, on what the implementation of the recent unanimous Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling on Rutledge v. Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) may look like.

Alana Hippensteele: What might the implementation of the recent ruling by SCOTUS look like and do you see the implementation changing state by state?

Brian Nightengale: Yeah, that's the way it's going to have to go, right. The SCOTUS ruling was specific to the Arkansas law, and as I mentioned before, there are many, many other states. There's a huge backlog of legislative activity, in fact, I believe there's ACT activity through different phases of the legislative process in over 40 states. There are 2 states that I know of that have active cases before their courts now: North Dakota and Oklahoma.

So, again, like I mentioned before, what that SCOTUS [ruling] is going to do, or the Rutledge rule is going to do, is provide guidance for all that activity that are already pending in the states, and certainly is going to, in my opinion, embolden other legislative activity. But again, the ruling within SCOTUS was pretty narrow to the Arkansas case, so to the extent that other cases vary significantly from the Arkansas law there'll still be court challenges for that. So, the activity is going to be state by state, and I think there'll be quite a bit of it this year.