Congress Delays Medicaid Prescription Requirement
Posted by WhiteCoat on September 27, 2007
According to this segment on NPR, Congress just approved a 6 month delay in implementing the requirement that all prescriptions must be written on tamper-proof paper.
The “law of unintended consequences” showed that most physicians weren’t prepared to comply and that Medicaid patients just wouldn’t be getting their prescriptions.
Maybe Dubya and company are reviewing my recommendations?
Wouldn’t it be interesting if none of the physicians ever complied with this silly law?
September 28, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Wouldn’t it be interesting if none of the physicians ever complied with this silly law?
It won’t matter to physicians one way or the other. It’s us poor pharmacists who will be getting the shaft. If we fill an order and it’s not on the tamper-proof pad, we don’t get paid. No penalty for the physician, but the RPh gets screwed.
It’s bad enough that pharmacists have to police all of the pseudoephedrine sales, there is even talk now of dextromethorphan going the same route. Just make all the PSE and DMX products legend drugs again and let us get back to counselling patients instead of playing cop.
October 9, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I agree with Pharmacy God. The pharmacists are the ones who have to pay the ultimate price. The doctors will lose a few cents on the paper or switching to a fax transmission, but pharmacists will have to waste time calling to verify every single non-compliant script, or risk losing the whole reimbursement in a compliance audit. We can’t legally deny a Medicaid patient their meds, and now pharmacists are going to have to choose to either serve the patients’ best interests but not get reimbursed, or delay providing care but get paid for it. The pharmacy I used to work at did 500 prescriptions a day, and 95% of the patients were on Medicaid. It averaged half an hour to fill a prescription when I worked there last year. I can only imagine how long a prescription will take when the pharmacy staff has to call to verify that 78-year-old Mrs. Jones isn’t forging her prescription for atenolol.
I’m glad there’s been a six-month delay. Some of the docs in the area are compliant already, but it’s a relatively small percentage.
Jane