01/05/2026
Stockmen's Drug (also Stockmen's Drug Crawford) Blog
January 2026
Welcome everyone to the New Year.
Helen (the owner) was kind enough to allow the staff to start a monthly blog post on social media so we can touch base with the community,
New years bring challenges and changes that must be addressed on both sides of the customer/business line. From a pharmacy perspective here are a few things everyone should keep in mind:
Insurance changes – sometimes there are behind the scenes changes, other times you participated in open enrollment and made changes to your insurance. January or the first time you fill medication in a new year there may be delays or costs associated with this. If you had a change of insurance plans it may be a good idea to pass that information to your pharmacy ahead of time. If the insurance changed terms behind the scenes they may have sent a new insurance card with either a different policy or group number (we need this).
• Deductibles – It’s never fun, but insurance deductibles roll back over on the 1st of January. That means they will show up again.
• We encountered last year (2025) that the Insurance companies made changes to the policy numbers for insurances around February or March. If this happens there may be delays as in 2025 new cards were not issued without the patient requesting.
• Prior Authorizations: Prior Authorizations may need to be restarted. For certain medications, such as insulin injections (such as Ozempic and Mounjaro) or blood thinners (such as Eliquis), a new prior authorization may need to be obtained. This can delay refills and should be taken into account.
• Friday fills – due to price changes and new releases taking place among normally brand only medications the on hand inventory of some medications (such as Jardiance, Xarelto, and Eliquis) was kept low. We ran into complications filling medications on 01/02/2026 as we didn’t have any inventory to fill with. We the technicians advise to call in your refills before 5:00 PM on Thursdays if you are expecting to run out over the weekend. This gives us time to order replacement stock and have the fills ready before the weekend.
Winter Wonderland
This has been an interesting winter so far, having lived here for just about 6 years myself I have seen quite a bit of variation in how the winters hit. So far, the pattern we have seen is when it has been a light winter early in the year, we have a wet and icy winter in March and April. We hope everyone is safe and prepared.
Authored by: Jason R. CPhT
