Johnny Hargroue

CPhT, Marketing Coordinator Ark Pharmacies

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@pop_tartlet A truck full of Ozempic Orange Barrels 😂

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@TexasFancyBoots Ty for Ty Cobb.

[Andrew Lloyd Webber @OfficialALW]

Still not over the Phantom 40th celebrations? Neither are we. 🌹🎹

Here's Andrew at the piano playing All I Ask of You to cure those Monday blues.

#Phantom40 #ThePhantomOfTheOpera #AndrewLloydWebber

[Rich Luchette @richluchette]

After the Bears fired him in 1993, Ditka made a cameo appearance on the SNL cold open with the Superfans. What a loss.

[Crawly's Cubs Kingdom @crawlyscubs]

Mike Ditka was scheduled to sing the seventh inning stretch on July 5th, 1998. This was the year that Harry Caray died and the “guest conductor” was new at Wrigley Field. Ditka got stuck in traffic and was running late. By the time the top of the seventh ended, Ditka was still not there and Steve Stone and Chip Caray stalled for time. Finally Ditka busts into the press box, grabs the mic, and screams Take Me Out To The Ball Game in twenty two seconds! Organist Gary Pressy could barely keep up! The crowd roared with approval! R.I.P. Mike Ditka

[Andrew Lloyd Webber @OfficialALW]

It's remarkable what a few notes can come to mean over forty years.
Forty years on, and it still feels very special to play these chords.

Happy 40 years to @PhantomOpera 🌹

#Phantom40 #AndrewLloydWebber #PhantomoftheOpera

[𝕃𝕚𝕖𝕦𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕥 ℂ𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕝 ℙ 🪖 @TheLtColUSMC]

Can we take a moment to appreciate Navy football going full Marine Corps with the Semper Fidelis uniforms?

That blood stripe. 🩸😮‍💨

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@NHargroue_1

[Michael S. Kim @Mike_kim714]

Everyone’s favorite! Giveaway!

I’m teaming up with my friends @DunningGolf to give away a $1,000 😳 gift card to their online store https://t.co/pOsJakvH2I.

Here's how to enter:
1. Like and repost
2. Follow myself and @DunningGolf 
3. Tag a friend in the replies

Winner will be chosen on Thursday. Must be in the U.S. to enter*

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@choppaslide In disguise 😂

[the Sports ON Tap @thesportsontap]

In 2003, the most hated team in the NBA did the kindest thing anyone has ever done on a basketball court.

April 25, 2003. Rose Garden, Portland. Game 3 of the first round against Dallas. The Blazers are down 2-0 and facing elimination from the moment they wake up.

That Blazers team had a nickname. The Jail Blazers.

They were, at the time, maybe the least likable team in professional sports. Arrests. Suspensions. A roster full of guys the national media treated as villains. Portland fans were exhausted by them.

Before the game, a 13 year old girl named Natalie Gilbert walks to center court to sing the national anthem in front of 19,980 people.

What nobody in the building knew is that she was sick. She had the flu. She later said she just didn't feel like herself at all that day.

She gets a few lines in.

And then her brain goes blank.

She sings "star's last gleaming" instead of "twilight's last gleaming," realizes it instantly, and stops. She looks around. She puts her hand to her face.

Thirteen years old. Twenty thousand people. National television. Frozen.

There is no worse feeling available to a human being.

And then a man walks out of the Portland huddle.

Maurice Cheeks, the head coach, minutes away from a playoff elimination game, leaves his team, walks across the floor, puts his arm around her shoulder and says, "C'mon."

Then he starts singing with her.

Now understand something. Maurice Cheeks cannot sing. At all. He is not remotely trying to rescue the performance.

He's just refusing to let a kid stand there alone.

He keeps his arm around her the whole way. He feeds her the next words. And within a few seconds, all 19,980 people in that building stand up and sing it with them.

A moment that was going to define a little girl's life in the worst possible way became the exact opposite.

Dan Patrick wrote at the time that Cheeks' simple actions had become the defining moment of the entire playoffs.

They went on Jay Leno together. CNN. Good Morning America. It became one of the first truly viral NBA moments, years before that word meant anything.

Portland lost the game. They lost the series. Cheeks finished his Blazers tenure with a fairly ordinary record and was eventually let go.

Now here's the ending.

In March 2025, almost 22 years later, Maurice Cheeks came back to Portland as an assistant coach with the New York Knicks.

The Blazers found Natalie Gilbert.

She's 35 now. Married. Goes by Natalie Zito. She's also, as it turns out, a Blazers season ticket holder.

They brought her back to sing the anthem again.

She nailed it. The whole building erupted. And the camera cut to Cheeks on the sideline, beaming like a proud father.

The two of them met before the game and hugged.

What she said afterward is why this story matters. She explained that she'd been made fun of a lot as a kid, and that in the moment she felt most helpless and hopeless, a stranger walked right over with no hesitation.

"This moment changed my life."

And then she said something even better. That she wouldn't go back and change any of it. That seeing him again and finding out he's still the same standup guy proved it was all real.

Twenty two years. One arm around a shoulder.

Follow @thesportsontap, we post a story like this every day.

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@ForestParkPharm @LoisKolkhorst @TrentAshbyTX @TomOliverson

[Tom Oliverson, M.D. @TomOliverson]

I’m ready to roll on this in the TX House. Let’s go!

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

TRICARE got robbed in broad daylight and nobody at the Pentagon can be bothered to look up from their coffee.

Sen. Warren put the receipts on the table last week (5.22.26 hearing) and what came out of that room should be on the front page of every paper in the country.

According to The Lever / Fed. News Net., Express Scripts' own pharmacy charges the DOD an average of $484 EXTRA on every generic prescription compared to what independent pharmacies get reimbursed. On MILLIONS of scripts. Every year. Do the math and you start to see the size of the hole that's being drilled into the defense health budget.

Here's the trick they're running:

Express Scripts is the PBM that runs the TRICARE pharmacy network. They've held that contract since 2009. Cigna bought them in 2018. The same company that decides what every pharmacy gets paid… also owns its own mail-order pharmacy that competes in the same network. So they set the price, they pay the bill, and the check lands in their own pocket. Pentagon → Express Scripts → Express Scripts. Rigged.

Real example. Ezetimibe (generic Zetia, cholesterol med):

— Independent pharmacy fills the script: reimbursed $0. Not a typo. Zero. — Express Scripts' OWN mail-order pharmacy fills the exact same script: pays itself $1,000.

Same pill. $1,000 difference. Taxpayer funded.

The consequence is exactly what you'd expect: ~13,000 pharmacies have walked away from the TRICARE network since 2022. That's nearly 1 in 6 independent pharmacies in the entire country. Military families and veterans are watching their local pharmacy options collapse because Express Scripts offered terms so bad nobody could afford to stay.

When Sen. Warren asked Assistant Secretary Stephen Bass about the cost, his answer was basically "I'm not aware." Nine million TRICARE beneficiaries, billions of dollars, and the guy whose desk it sits on hasn't bothered to check the price. He'd notice real fast if it was his own credit card.

And in case anyone thinks this is just bad management — there's an active whistleblower lawsuit alleging BILLIONS in fraud against Express Scripts and Accredo. The federal government has paused payments to other vendors for far, far less.

So here's the message that needs to land on Secretary @RobertKennedyJr's desk:

Cancel the payments. The $4.3B TRICARE contract is up for revision annually until 2029. There is a lever. Pull it.

Demand a real audit. DOD has refused to check pricing since the 2021 contract. Warren got a commitment on 5.22.26 — now make it happen.

Criminal charges. If the whistleblower allegations hold up, this isn't a billing dispute. It's looting a military health program.

And @NickShirley — you exposed $9 billion in Medicaid daycare fraud in Minnesota and got the feds to freeze payments statewide off ONE investigation. 134M+ views. This is the same playbook, bigger target, bigger stakes — 9 million military families and vets, tens of billions a year, and a single address worth driving to: 1 Express Way, St. Louis, MO 63121. Go expose this.

People should be losing their minds over this.

[American Pharmacies @APRxNews]

𝐒𝐞𝐧. 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦

Sen. Warren demanded answers from Asst. Sec. of Defense for Health Affairs Keith Bass about ESI’s conflicts of interest in the TRICARE program. She pointed out 9 million servicemembers were suffering and taxpayers were overpaying because:

• Approx. 13,000 pharmacies have left the TRICARE network because of Express Scripts’ under-reimbursement practices.

• Express Scripts was paying its own pharmacies an average of $484 more per generic prescription than the pharmacies it does not own.

She explained that ESI acting both as the TRICARE PBM and a network pharmacy “gives Express Scripts an incentive to under-reimburse all of the competing pharmacies and inflate its own payments.”

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

Spot on. And even on prescriptions that are dispensed below the actual cost, pharmacists provide valuable medication information, reconciliation and sometimes even care coordination assistance at no additional cost and without a mechanism to bill for their services.

[John P Erwin III MD MBA MACC (#BigPoppy ) @HeartOTXHeartMD]

How PBMs directly contribute
PBMs (the big three — Optum Rx, CVS Caremark, and Express Scripts — control ~80% of all U.S. prescription claims) act as middlemen between insurers/employers and pharmacies. They decide which drugs are covered and, crucially, how much they will reimburse pharmacies for filling those prescriptions. Pharmacists and the Texas Pharmacy Association say this system is strangling rural independents in these key ways:🧵

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@TomOliverson @DrBenMcNabb Totally agree…but the reimbursement needs to be fixed also. Otherwise the PBMs will pay their mail-order pharmacies more $.

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@KennethCassel @westoplexgarage

[Jonathan Wall @jonathanrwall]

Let do a Monday giveaway, just because: @CallawayGolf Opus SP+ sand wedge (56-10S)

Just need to RT and be following along. I’ll DM the winner on Wednesday. 🤙🏻

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@RickGarnett @NHargroue_1 have you seen these movies?

[Johnny Hargroue @JHargroue]

@writeclimbrun