Here’s a prescription for anyone using prescription medication: Fasten your seat-belt, it’s going to be a bumpy year.
New York State has ordained that, starting March 27 (Easter Sunday!), there shall be no more paper-and-ink prescriptions, anywhere in the state.
Anything requiring a prescription must be transmitted electronically, instead.
This measure is supposedly intended to combat the abuse, by addicts, of opioid drugs.
Just how it’s going to accomplish that is beyond me. It seems to me that, now, every hacker from here to China will have free range over things that used to at least require a physical piece of paper, in an actual person’s hand.
But what do I know?
I have other, more urgent questions: Why so little notice? Why no change-over period? And why punish everyone for the sins of a few?
Whoever made this ruling could have limited it to so-called “controlled substances” — you know: oxycodone; Valium; chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. But no, they’ve come out with a blanket “fatwah” covering anything stronger than Tylenol in the entire state of New York.
It is sure to go haywire; and when it does, I know who will be left holding the (empty) bag: you and me.
Let’s say you’re the mom of an infant with a fever. The pediatrician says it’s a serious ear infection, and you must start the baby on antibiotics immediately, if you want to keep their ear-drums from rupturing.
Once upon a time, you would race to the pharmacy, clutching your child and the magical piece of paper bearing the all-important prescription.
Even then, as often as not, you might be told, “Oh! We don’t have that in stock— it’s on the truck. Won’t be back until tomorrow.”
But in the bad old days of paper-and-ink, you could walk out the door, script in hand, and down the street until you found a pharmacy that did, indeed, stock what you needed.
But now we’re all efficient and modern. And when the pharmacy doesn’t have what you need, you must call the doctor; beg them to unsend the prescription to Pharmacy A, and send it instead to Pharmacy B.
You will then be told, “Oh, the doctor cannot do that, they’re in with a patient. ” And no one else in the doctor’s office will do.
So you wait. And by the time the doctor can come to the phone, the pharmacist has gone home. So now, in this brave new world, New York State’s only advice for you is to go home with a sick, screaming child, and no medication.
Somehow, this doesn’t feel like an improvement.
Now let’s add the insurance company — because, of course, nothing today happens without them.
I’m no opium addict, I’m just a middle-aged allergy sufferer. But nowadays, no matter what I need, I can’t have it. It’s not on the “formulary”; I must switch to something cheaper; and usually, it needs to be shipped, every 90 days, from somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Sometimes, I’m switched to something I’ve never heard of. But other times, it’s something that, over years of experience with my trusted doctor, we finally figured out was making my nose bleed, or giving me a headache, or for some other reason just didn’t work.
Now, I am forced to switch because some corporate bean-counter has decided it’s two tenths of a penny cheaper — before dashing off, no doubt leaving work early to test-drive a new Mercedes.
Where is their medical diploma? Where’s their oath to “first, do no harm?” And where, I wonder, will that bean-counter be in the middle of the night, when my child awakens screaming with that ear-ache, or my sinuses hemorrhage again? Since the insurance folks know so much better than my doctor what I should be taking, I think it’s only fair that I have their home number to call, whenever things go wrong.
I can see where all this modernized efficiency is taking me. I will be at the dark end of a parking lot, hunched over with one of my friends, swapping meds.
“I need Singulaire — just a few days, to hold me over till the box arrives.”
“I’ve got some — have you got a Nasonex inhaler?”
“Yeah, I’ve got one — I hardly used it at all.”
“Deal.”
And so this system, supposedly invented to combat crime, ends up turning us into criminals, instead.
Thank goodness plain old headache remedies like aspirin and Tylenol don’t require prescriptions, because we are all going to need them.
