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Why community pharmacies are closing – and what to do if your neighborhood location shutters
Lucas A. Berenbrok, University of Pittsburgh; Michael Murphy, The Ohio State University, and Sophia Herbert, University of Pittsburgh
Neighborhood pharmacies are rapidly shuttering.
Not long ago, Walgreens, one of the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains, announced plans to close 1,200 stores over the next three years. That’s part of a larger trend that has seen nearly 7,000 pharmacy locations close since 2019, with more expected in the coming years.
Many community pharmacies are struggling to stay open due to an overburdened workforce, shrinking reimbursement rates for prescription drugs and limited opportunities to bill insurers for services beyond dispensing medications.
As trained pharmacists who advocate for and take care of patients in community settings, we’ve witnessed this decline firsthand. The loss of local pharmacies threatens individual and community access to medications, pharmacist expertise and essential public health resources.
The changing role of pharmacies
Community pharmacies – which include independently owned, corporate-chain and other retail pharmacies in neighborhood settings – have changed a lot over the past decades. What once were simple medication pickup points have evolved into hubs for health and wellness. Beyond dispensing prescriptions, pharmacists today provide vaccinations, testing and treatment for infectious diseases, access to hormonal birth control and other clinical services they’re empowered to provide by federal and state laws.
Given their importance, then, why have so many community pharmacies been closing?
There are many reasons, but the most important is reduced reimbursement for prescription drugs. Most community pharmacies operate under a business model centered on dispensing medications that relies on insurer reimbursements and cash payments from patients. Minor revenue comes from front-end sales of over-the-counter products and other items.
However, pharmacy benefit managers – companies that manage prescription drug benefits for insurers and employers – have aggressively cut reimbursement rates in an effort to lower drug costs in recent years. As a result, pharmacists often have to dispense prescription drugs at very low margins or even at a loss. In some cases, pharmacists are forced to transfer prescriptions to other pharmacies willing to absorb the financial hit. Other times, pharmacists choose not to stock these drugs at all.
And it’s not just mom-and-pop operations feeling the pinch. Over the past four years, the three largest pharmacy chains have announced plans to close hundreds of stores nationwide. CVS kicked off the trend in 2021 by announcing plans to close 900 pharmacy locations. In late 2023, Rite Aid said that thousands of its stores would be at risk for closure due to bankruptcy. And late in 2024, Walgreens announced its plans to close 1,200 stores over the next three years.
To make matters worse, pharmacists, like many other health care providers, have been facing burnout due to high stress and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, pharmacy school enrollment has declined, worsening the workforce shortage just as an impending shortfall of primary care physicians looms.
Why pharmacy accessibility matters
The increasing closure of community pharmacies has far-reaching consequences for millions of Americans. That’s because neighborhood pharmacies are one of the most accessible health care locations in the country, with an estimated 90% of Americans living within 5 miles of one.
However, research shows that “pharmacy deserts” are more common in marginalized communities, where people need accessible health care the most. For example, people who live in pharmacy deserts are also more likely to have a disability that makes it hard or impossible to walk. Many of these areas are also classified as medically underserved areas or health professional shortage areas. As pharmacy closures accelerate, America’s health disparities could get even worse.
So if your neighborhood pharmacy closes, what should you do?
While convenience and location matter, you might want to consider other factors that can help you meet your health care needs. For example, some pharmacies have staff who speak your native language, independent pharmacy business owners may be active in your community, and many locations offer over-the-counter products like hormonal contraception, the overdose-reversal drug naloxone and hearing aids.
You may also consider locations – especially corporate-owned pharmacies – that also offer urgent care or primary care services. In addition, most pharmacies offer vaccinations, and some offer test-and-treat services for infectious diseases, diabetes education and help with quitting smoking.
What to ask if your pharmacy closes
If your preferred pharmacy closes and you need to find another one, keep the following questions in mind:
• What will happen to your old prescriptions? When a pharmacy closes, another pharmacy may buy its prescriptions. Ask your pharmacist if your prescriptions will be automatically transferred to a nearby pharmacy, and when this will occur.
• What’s the staffing situation like at other pharmacies? This is an important factor in choosing a new pharmacy. What are the wait times? Can the team accommodate special situations like emergency refills or early refills before vacations? Does the pharmacist have a relationship with your primary care physician and your other prescribers?
• Which pharmacies accept your insurance? A simple call to your insurer can help you understand where your prescriptions are covered at the lowest cost. And if you take a medication that’s not covered by insurance, or if you’re uninsured, you should ask if the pharmacy can help you by offering member pricing or manufacturer coupons and discounts.
• What are your accessibility needs? Pharmacies often offer services to make your care more accessible and convenient. These may include medication packaging services, drive-thru windows and home delivery. And if you’re considering switching to a mail-order pharmacy, you should ask if it has a pharmacist to answer questions by phone or during telehealth visits.
Remember that it’s best to have all your prescriptions filled at the same pharmacy chain or location so that your pharmacist can perform a safety check with your complete medication list. Drug interactions can be dangerous.
Community pharmacies have been staples of neighborhoods for more than a century. Unfortunately, current trends in pharmacy closures pose real threats to public health. We hope lawmakers address the underlying systemic issues so more Americans don’t lose access to their medications, health services and pharmacists.
Lucas A. Berenbrok, Associate Professor of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, University of Pittsburgh; Michael Murphy, Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice and Science, The Ohio State University, and Sophia Herbert, Assistant Professor of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
financial wellness
Personal bankruptcy filings are soaring in 2026, signaling growing economic distress
Personal bankruptcy filings are climbing as inflation, high interest rates and mounting household debt strain American consumers. Although bankruptcy can provide a fresh start, financial recovery may take decades.
Jay L. Zagorsky, Boston University
The number of Americans who file for bankruptcy is growing. More than 500,000 people took this step in 2025, nearly 50% more than in 2022. And the numbers have kept on climbing, with a 12% jump in June 2026 from a year earlier as many consumers struggled to pay their bills.
I am a business school professor who has researched bankruptcies and whether, when you are at the end of your financial rope, bankruptcy helps or hurts.
I became interested in the subject while in graduate school. Not because of any courses I took, but because I ran out of money. While I was in grad school, my wife, who was keeping the family afloat, unexpectedly lost her job at the very moment our savings went to zero.
Ultimately, we didn’t declare bankruptcy, and I’ll explain later what we did to avoid it. But this near brush with that fate sparked my long-term interest in this predicament that befalls many American consumers who find themselves financially stressed out.
What’s personal bankruptcy?
Bankruptcy is a legal process for people who can’t pay their debts. Because it usually requires liquidating their assets or entering a repayment plan, Americans generally turn to it as a last resort. To declare bankruptcy you first file a petition with a federal court, which appoints a trustee to oversee your case.
But bankruptcy does not discharge all debts.
There are 19 types of debts that even bankruptcy will not wipe out. Some of the bigger categories are alimony, child support and most taxes. Student loans can be wiped out, but getting that done is difficult and it’s not an automatic part of bankruptcy proceedings.
2 conflicting goals
U.S. bankruptcy law has two big goals that contradict each other.
The first is to give honest individual debtors a “fresh start.” The process ideally reduces or eliminates enough of their debt to make it possible to earn, spend, borrow and repay money like people with a more typical financial life. In other words, personal bankruptcy can take the financial noose off debtors’ necks.
The second is to ensure that creditors get repaid as much as possible for their loans. When someone declares bankruptcy, some or maybe all of their creditors don’t get their money back. In 2024, the Americans who filed for bankruptcy had about US$75 billion in assets, but they owed their creditors about $86 billion – $11 billion more.
States and the federal government make different trade-offs between these goals. As a result there are very different limits on how much equity – the difference between market value and what you owe – debtors can keep in their primary homes and personal property after they declare bankruptcy.
Some states are quite lenient. For example, Texas bankruptcy law doesn’t limit the amount of equity in a home at all. That helps debtors get back on their feet.
Other states are extremely strict in this regard. Arkansas limits home equity after personal bankruptcy to $800, and Kentucky restricts it to $5,000. This helps creditors: Lenders can force a debtor’s house to be sold and keep much of the equity the debtor built up.
Likewise, laws protecting vehicles and other kinds of personal property belonging to people who declare bankruptcy vary widely.
2 types of personal bankruptcy
People declaring bankruptcy typically file using either Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy code.
About 2 in 3 people use Chapter 7, a form of financial liquidation. The bankruptcy court appoints a trustee, who then sells off all of a person’s possessions, except what is covered by the various exemptions.
The trustee then gives creditors whatever money is left after the sale. In exchange for giving up most of what someone owns, filing Chapter 7 wipes out almost all debts and gives them a fresh financial start.
For people earning moderate to high incomes and whose debts are less than $2.75 million, bankruptcy courts make them use Chapter 13.
Chapter 13 is a slower-moving process. Creditors are paid over three to five years from a person’s earnings. Debtors keep enough of their wages to cover necessary living expenses, but all other disposable income goes to creditors. Chapter 13 allows people to save their homes from foreclosure and keep their vehicles.
Bankruptcy filing rising after decline
The number of personal bankruptcies filed annually fell sharply for more than a decade before the recent uptick, hitting a low of about 368,000 in 2022, down from about 1.5 million in 2010.
That number has climbed steadily since 2022.
A 2005 law called the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act sparked the earlier decline. Its goal was to make declaring bankruptcy harder and more expensive. Many creditors pushed for these changes because they felt some individuals were abusing the system.
The changes introduced income limits for eligibility to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It also required people to get credit counseling before filing to see whether there was any way they could avoid bankruptcy. It also added a new obligation: Americans now take a course in financial management after they file for bankruptcy to reduce the chance of future money troubles.
One interesting study regarding the legislation’s impact found that it lowered credit card interest rates, but it also prevented some people without health insurance from wiping out their medical debts.
The 2005 changes caused the number of personal bankruptcies to plunge. That ended with the Great Recession, which lasted from late 2007 until mid-2009.
This economic downturn pushed up the number of bankruptcies dramatically. But then the number fell from 2010 until 2022, as the Great Recession’s impact gradually receded. The decline continued into the early 2020s because the stimulus checks and more generous unemployment insurance payments the government provided at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic helped keep millions of U.S. consumers afloat.
The numbers began to rise again in 2022 as American consumers began facing increasing stress from income that has not kept pace with inflation and a sharp jump in credit card interest rates.
Lasting changes
Bankruptcy stays on your credit report for up to 10 years. After that, creditors are supposed to treat people who filed for it like anyone else. A study I worked on with law professor Lois Lupica tracked what happened over two decades to both people who had and had not declared bankruptcy. We wanted to see whether those who had filed for bankruptcy really got out of their financial hole.
Our findings were a good news, bad news story. The good news was that bankruptcy was not causing permanent financial stigma. The average person who declared bankruptcy eventually caught up financially with their peers who hadn’t.
The bad news was that it took 15-25 years to recover in almost all financial dimensions. This is longer than those 10 years that the bankruptcy filing stays on your credit report.
In short, we determined that bankruptcy does give people a fresh start, but getting that reprieve takes longer than the law’s intent.
Strategies that can stave off bankruptcy
My wife and I avoided bankruptcy primarily by doing two things.
First, we switched to using cash for most of our day-to-day purchases. When our wallets were empty, we were done spending. I talk more about this in my 2025 book “The Power of Cash.”
Second, we contacted the financial company where we owed our biggest monthly payment. After providing proof of financial hardship, they were surprisingly flexible.
If these two steps are not enough for you, the next step is to consult an attorney who specializes in bankruptcy law. While there are lots of things most people can competently do on their own, filing for bankruptcy is not one of them.
Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Business, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
STM Blog
Many Americans are moving away from congregations, but not necessarily from religion – movies, plays, art and social media fill the gap
Choosing my Religion: Americans may be stepping away from traditional congregations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re abandoning religion. Movies, theater, music, podcasts, social media and other cultural spaces are becoming new ways for people to explore faith, identity and community.
Laura Yares, Michigan State University and Sharon Avni, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.
But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.
She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.
Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”
But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.
Learning through art
As scholars of Judaism and education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.
We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”
Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.
Screen and stage
Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.
“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.
“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.
Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.
For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.
New questions
Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.
The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.
The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.
Laura Yares, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University and Sharon Avni, Professor of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The United States’ human rights practices are taking a nosedive
New human rights data shows the United States’ civil and political rights record deteriorated sharply in 2025, with major declines involving detention, free expression, religious freedom and political participation.
K. Chad Clay, University of Georgia
In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know.
On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.
On the other hand, while marking the United States’ 250th anniversary this year, President Donald Trump called the country “the home of freedom,” “the land of liberty” and “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”
“We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before,” he said.
So which is it?
According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies – countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’s poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.
In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.
Even accounting for the U.S.’s prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative shows that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further.
As a human rights scholar who has been measuring human rights practices for 20 years – and as one of HRMI’s co-founders – I believe this data raises serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.
How are rights practices measured?
Governments rarely publish accurate information on their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars.
Historically, most international measures of civil and political rights have depended on public reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or news organizations.
However, these reports cannot cover every human rights violation that experts know about, especially in countries with low government transparency or high levels of repression.
Thus, data produced using those sources will show fewer abuses than those that have actually occurred and will be more accurate about some places than others. Further, the Trump administration has changed one of the most important sources of human rights information, the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, to contain more bias in favor of the administration’s foreign allies and less information on human rights abuse overall.
Since 2017, HRMI has used a different approach. Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.
Today, HRMI’s civil and political rights dataset covers 62 countries, with more added every year.
How does the US compare?
According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights – such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment – the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.
Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states, which include the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.
The Human Rights Scores dataset has not been updated past 2021, but HRMI’s data collected since that time suggests that the pattern has continued.
Among the six high-income OECD countries on which HRMI currently collects data, the U.S. has been the worst performer for physical integrity rights since 2017.
It has also frequently been rated as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.
What changed in 2025?
Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’s civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. HRMI measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.
These were not small changes. Measured against every significant change HRMI has recorded since 2017, the U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.
The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.
The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation – that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which are, respectively, the rights to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.
What caused the scores to fall?
Human rights experts raised several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’s worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by ICE and other immigration-related agencies.
While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.
Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’s rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.
Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”
While current HRMI data does not yet cover 2026, early indicators are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics.
K. Chad Clay, Director, Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS); Associate Professor of International Affairs, University of Georgia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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