What They’re Watching: Chris Howes
Chris Howes is President of the Howes Group, LLC – a lobbying firm with 18 years of experience at the Colorado State Capitol. He joins us in this edition of “What They’re Watching” to discuss the ways his firm has worked to enable providers to maximize their practice.
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Our firm represents the chain pharmacies of Colorado – nearly 750 pharmacies. We’re looking at lots of interesting things that might be coming our way, including drug importation from Canada. We’re also very interested in allowing our pharmacist employees to practice at the very top of their license. These are folks who go to school for six years, they have PharmDs. We want to make sure we can use their professional abilities the best way we can to cut down on health care costs and improve services and safety for their patients.
Because the pharmacist and the pharmacy are so important as the triad for the patient and doctor, we really have to watch the legislation that would affect drug importation. We’re also very interested to see what’s going to come out of this public option proposal. We represent a number of providers including pharmacies and we want to make sure their reimbursement rates are appropriate for all the work that they’re doing.
Our firm also represents EMS professionals. We want to allows those EMS professionals to work in a health care system where we can save money and improve patient outcomes. We also want to allow them to work at the top of their profession when it comes to education and we’ve run a number of bills that speak to their scope of practice.”
