PIN Rx sold; 40 jobs expected in County

CARIBOU – A mail-order pharmacy will bring 40 new jobs and a $9 million investment to Aroostook County according to an announcement officials made Tuesday that the company will open a packing and distribution center in Fort Fairfield.

I Care Pharmacy, which fills mail-order prescriptions, began providing services this week to MaineCare clients previously served by PIN Rx, the Penobscot Indian Nation’s mail-order pharmacy. Ten I Care employees started up operations Monday out of the former PIN Rx facility at Indian Island near Old Town. Company officials plan to relocate operations to Fort Fairfield by mid-April.

PIN Rx is under state investigation for allegedly dispensing $3 million in drugs on the Internet without verifying prescriptions. The Governor’s Office of Health Policy and Finance helped the Penobscot Indian Nation develop the pharmacy, which opened in October 2005. Officials said the pharmacy would provide economic development to the tribe as well as fill MaineCare prescriptions for less cost than a retail pharmacy. The program for low-income Mainers was expected to save an estimated $5 million a year. Fewer than 1 percent of MaineCare participants, about 3,000 people, however, switched from local pharmacies to PIN Rx.

I Care Pharmacy now will serve those Mainers and has long-term plans of serving clients throughout Maine and in other states.

“An opportunity arose,” Jerry Tanner, president and co-owner of I Care Pharmacy, said Tuesday. “We’re trying to keep this in Maine so it employs Maine people and Maine gets to keep the revenue. … When you start pulling resources out of the state, it affects your economy. Once those dollars leave, you know as well as I do that they don’t come back. And since I’m living here, I’m going to do as much as possible to prevent that.”

Tanner has lived in Fort Fairfield for about two years. He and business partner Terry Greenier, originally from Fort Fairfield, have home health care and pharmacy businesses in Alaska that employ about 700 people and are worth about $20 million. They also own the Irish Setter Pub on Main Street in Presque Isle.

They co-own I Care Pharmacy, a branch of T&G LLC, with local pharmacists Heather Cassidy and Alan Wiseman.

Local economic development officials said the company’s creation and decision to locate in Aroostook County was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Walt Elish, president and CEO of the Aroostook Partnership for Progress, said Tuesday that he approached Tanner about a month ago after APP officials learned that he was considering starting a business in Maine similar to those he maintains in Alaska. Soon after that, the news broke about PIN Rx, and in the past week, the sale of PIN Rx to I Care has been completed.

“We were pursuing a sale due to the business obstacles we were up against,” Penobscot Nation Chief Kirk Francis said Tuesday. “The PIN Rx board made a decision that the best case for them was to sell.

“It was a win-win situation for everyone because we were able to keep those MaineCare patients with no interruption to their service,” he said.

Francis said he hadn’t received any update regarding the status of the State Board of Pharmacy’s investigation into PIN Rx operations.

On Tuesday, Trish Riley, director of the Governor’s Office of Health Policy and Finance, said the state was pleased that an agreement has been reached allowing MaineCare recipients to continue getting prescriptions filled by mail.

“Our interest has always been in having a Maine-based mail-order option available, especially for MaineCare people that are homebound,” she said.

Riley said the state would provide information to MaineCare recipients about the new operation as soon as details are final, but that it is not providing any other form of support to I Care.

Despite PIN Rx’s failure to attract as much business or generate as much savings as the state had envisioned, and despite its current legal difficulties, Riley credited the Penobscot Nation with laying the groundwork for the mail-order program.

“They got it up and going,” she said.

Meanwhile, Elish said the Governor’s Office and the congressional delegation had been supportive of I Care’s endeavors.

“This is really exciting news for Aroostook County from APP’s perspective,” Elish said. “It represents a growing industry and a different type of industry that we hadn’t targeted before. It’s an industry we can see growing because of the need in Maine for this service.”

Tanner pointed out that this is Phase I of a three-phase business plan. Phase II involves getting Food and Drug Administration approval to manufacture generic prescription medication. Officials plan to expand that portion of their operations at the Loring Applied Technology Center in Limestone. In Phase III, Tanner said, the company hopes to establish a warehouse and distribution center. Officials would like to locate that facility in a central area of the state. Along the way, the company plans to increase its employment base and its investment in the state.

The way Elish sees it, that’s exactly what Aroostook County and the rest of Maine need.

“We see companies like this being the type of business people would move here to take a job for,” he said. “With those types of jobs being created, the partnership feels we are really beginning to address the issue of out-migration. These are the types of jobs where people can stay here, and those from away could come back and work here and make a good living.”

BDN writers Meg Haskell and Aimee Dolloff contributed to this report.