I’m sure they were legal prescriptions, but the government wants pharmacies to police doctors. Instead of just getting the doctor in trouble for writing for excess opioids, they want the pharmacies to be in trouble for filling the prescription the doctor wrote.
The pharmacies make more money for selling more scripts, so the company isn’t incentivized to police the doctors and tell them “no” and there isn’t a set guideline on who to tell no and for what reason, but somehow the pharmacies are at fault.
My take is that if the federal or state governments feel that doctors are writing too many opioid scripts, they should go after the doctors, not the pharmacies.
Pharmacist here. I can’t really agree with that take. We have shared liability, in large part because the doctor is super good at diagnosis, and relatively good at what to prescribe for it, and a pharmacist is not good at all at diagnosis, but is trained specifically on medications and interactions.
A doctor should not be prescribing something harmful for you, but it happens, and the pharmacist catches it and calls and gets it straightened out. That’s a normal situation, but opioids are a bit different.
The doctors were overprescibing, but we always were allowed to refuse prescriptions. If it was questionable, we can always call and document our conversation with the doctor. I’ve never heard of a pharmacist getting in trouble if they actually called and verified the MD did truly want that much medication, after being specifically warned of the risks.
If the pharmacists did that call for all of these, then I’m with you it’s the doctors’ fault. But if they just took in the prescriptions and filled them without checking for safe use, they failed to do their job protecting the patient from harm.
An addict will get or steal prescriptions from multiple doctors. How does policing doctors prevent abuse as well as making the pharmacy the gatekeeper?
There are lots of laws and regulations that don’t really work 100%, but make it harder for the crime to be committed. I think it fits into that category.
For example, many financial companies bend over backwards to try and prevent business activities from occurring over unapproved communication channels. Basically the SEC forces them to monitor all business activities, and if the company doesn’t at least try to do things like block personal email web sites, log text messages to clients on personal phones, etc., the company can be fined for not trying hard enough. Even though all the things meant to block or monitor can be easily bypassed.
I personally can’t decide if it’s the right thing to do in face of insolvable problems, or a stupid waste of time and resources. Probably a bit of both.
I’m sure they were legal prescriptions, but the government wants pharmacies to police doctors. Instead of just getting the doctor in trouble for writing for excess opioids, they want the pharmacies to be in trouble for filling the prescription the doctor wrote.
The pharmacies make more money for selling more scripts, so the company isn’t incentivized to police the doctors and tell them “no” and there isn’t a set guideline on who to tell no and for what reason, but somehow the pharmacies are at fault.
My take is that if the federal or state governments feel that doctors are writing too many opioid scripts, they should go after the doctors, not the pharmacies.
Pharmacist here. I can’t really agree with that take. We have shared liability, in large part because the doctor is super good at diagnosis, and relatively good at what to prescribe for it, and a pharmacist is not good at all at diagnosis, but is trained specifically on medications and interactions.
A doctor should not be prescribing something harmful for you, but it happens, and the pharmacist catches it and calls and gets it straightened out. That’s a normal situation, but opioids are a bit different.
The doctors were overprescibing, but we always were allowed to refuse prescriptions. If it was questionable, we can always call and document our conversation with the doctor. I’ve never heard of a pharmacist getting in trouble if they actually called and verified the MD did truly want that much medication, after being specifically warned of the risks.
If the pharmacists did that call for all of these, then I’m with you it’s the doctors’ fault. But if they just took in the prescriptions and filled them without checking for safe use, they failed to do their job protecting the patient from harm.
An addict will get or steal prescriptions from multiple doctors. How does policing doctors prevent abuse as well as making the pharmacy the gatekeeper?
There are lots of laws and regulations that don’t really work 100%, but make it harder for the crime to be committed. I think it fits into that category.
For example, many financial companies bend over backwards to try and prevent business activities from occurring over unapproved communication channels. Basically the SEC forces them to monitor all business activities, and if the company doesn’t at least try to do things like block personal email web sites, log text messages to clients on personal phones, etc., the company can be fined for not trying hard enough. Even though all the things meant to block or monitor can be easily bypassed.
I personally can’t decide if it’s the right thing to do in face of insolvable problems, or a stupid waste of time and resources. Probably a bit of both.
My take is that Rite Aid didnt pay the proper congressman to make this go away