The clock was about to strike midnight, and Scott Newman was desperately feeding pages into a scanner, trying to prevent thousands of dollars in prescription payments from turning into a pumpkin.
As the owner of Newman Family Pharmacy, an independent drugstore in Chesapeake, Virginia, he was responding to an audit ordered by a pharmacy benefit manager, an intermediary company that handles pharmacy payments for health insurance companies. The audit notice had come in January as he was scrambling to become certified to provide covid-19 vaccines, and it had slipped his mind.
