RFK Jr.: You need meds? What’re you gay?
PrFK Jr
Nothing a few hours on a tanning bed won’t fix.
I’m currently stuck in prior authorization hell and used the last dose of my med yesterday. Ugh. I hate this fucking country.
I had this bullshit happen in Florida at a Walgreens…I had a doctor put a prescription for me…we had worked together for a good while and finally found a script that works for me. Walgreens tells me they dont carry it, except I’ve had it filled in the past at that location.
Then this way over stepping mother fucker starts trying to diagnose me and then had the audacity to say, “have your doctor call us and we can see if we can work something out.”
Bitch what the fuck do you think the PRESCRIPTION is, that IS the communication between the pharmacy and the doctor, last time I went to Walgreens
I commented without reading what everyone else had to say, and the first words I typed were, “Is Walgreen’s your pharmacy too?”
What would piss me off is that they would constantly blow up my phone telling me to come get my script, it’s ready. Then I get to the pharmacy, and nothing is ready and I have to stand around awkwardly while I wait for them to fill it.
The final straw was I go in person to request a refill 5 days before I am out of meds. “Oh we haven’t gotten the shipment yet? Come back tomorrow.” So I go back the next day, and the next until I am finally out of meds and they still don’t have it in. Like, bitch, I have been filling this RX here for 2 years, do you mother fuckers not understand how to inventory?
After my last refill was up I had my Dr. start sending my scripts to Hannaford. It’s further away, but when they call me for my RX it’s ready for me when I go to pick it up.
To personify a bit, if I came across Walgreen’s dying in the street, I would step the fuck over their body and keep walking.
Pharmacist here. It’s not our fault as much as you think. Basically, the insurance companies invented something called “Pharmacy Benefits Managers” who basically act as a middleman between you and your doctor on what you can get, and how much they will reimburse the pharmacy if you do.
If your doctor says you need atorvastatin, but your PBM says they only want to pay for simvastatin, you can either get your doctor to pay for simvastatin, or pay for atorvastatin yourself with a discount card. The cost for a generic med like that is probably about your copay anyways, so no big loss to you to skip the headache.
Surprisingly, they invented fees for pharmacies! If you choose the route to get your doctor to change you to simvastatin, we get the privilege of managing that for you, and once we finally reach your doctor and make the change, they will give us maybe $10 to fill it for you! Plus you have a $10 copay, so there is some money… But of course we have to source the med. It probably costs us like $12 for this example, maybe less maybe more, depending on the manufacturer. So if we do all of this then it seems like we made $8, but SURPRISE, your PBM charged us a fee for utilizing them. It might be $6. It might be more if we don’t meet certain criteria, like percentage of diabetic patients on statins.
So okay we have our nice $2 to pay for shipping your med to the oharmacy, renting our location, and filling it (I think it’s less than half that on average, I just don’t know the actual figures) with our staff. It should come as no surprise that we have very limited options on manufacturers now.
You might say “well at least the PBM fought to make my meds cheaper in the end” but no! They now get to say to your insurance company “okay we managed getting your patient another month of lower cholesterol, please pay us $100 for our efforts”. So, indirectly, you paid an extra $100 on this whole thing through your insurance premiums. Not sure on if this part is true I just heard it as a rumor.
But wait there’s more! The insurance company actually owns the PBM all along! They paid themselves to offer themselves this service for you!
So anyways I’m getting out of retail pharmacy. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I didn’t need to get this upset before 8am. I don’t even take medications, but this is the exact type of nonsense that gets my blood boiling. That there’s anyone between a patient and their doctor (or perhaps a patient and a pharmacist) is just screaming for some forced changes.
the thing that annoys me is they don’t care that you have a chronic condition. it’s not going to change. i’m going to need this med for the rest of my life.
but they need my doctor to re-up the prescription every 6 months all the same
They do care if you have a chronic condition. If you do, they can charge you as much as they want.
This is because the doctor is supposed to be monitoring the condition and adjusting to a better med if one exists.
My wife recently had an issue where it was either an anaphylactic reaction or scombroid poisoning. They treated her at urgent care and prescribed an EpiPen in case it happened again. The pharmacy comes out and says sorry it’s $120. I know my wife has very good insurance so I had to fight with them, surely there’s a generic or something? Then they look into it and say well we have a different kind of one that this prescription covers that’s $5 but it expires in September. I’m like yeah, obviously I’ll take the one that’s 24x cheaper. Like why do we have to do this whole bullshit? Why didn’t you offer that one 1st? Fuck for profit healthcare.
Fuck any public service for profit.
I pick up prescriptions for people and CVS always fascinates me, they have like 6 people running around looking busy but somehow very few prescriptions are being filled.
Your CVS is staffed? The CVS and Walgreens around me are chronically understaffed. Like one pharmacist and one tech filling prescriptions and handing them out.
Weirdly, the Safeway pharmacy is always very well staffed. 2 pharmacists, 4 techs. I wonder how much better their benefits are than Walgreens.
Calling any CVS pharmacy around me is immediately met with an AI system that takes forever to transfer me to a person, where, i kid you not, they will pick up the phone and then leave it on the counter to dead air. Makes refilling my adhd meds very difficult since im required to speak to a person to get them filled.
You forgot the pharmacist who thinks they know more than your doctor and has the gall to opine on your prescription.
Dude.
MDs fuck up prescriptions all the time. You want this.
Yeah pharmacists often know a lot more about drugs than doctors, and they get to focus their whole career on getting good at just that
But thats like their main point. Pharmacist do know a lot about drugs. It’s important to know about negative drug interactions and a pharmacist is more likely to catch it since they most likely know all the drugs you are taking. Your GP might not know about the drugs your psychiatrist gave you or that off-label drug your dermatologist gave you because people are horrible at knowing what drugs they are on and for what purpose.
Fair enough. All I really mean is “idgaf some random pharmacist is opposed to stimulants.”
Honestly I’ve always been surprised how much education is required to be a pharmacist when all they do is put pills into a bottle (obeying whatever the doctor wrote on your prescription) and pass it to you through the window. Then imagine going through all the years of University to get a master’s degree to work in the back of a CVS.
Seriously? They source the drugs, in the correct dosage, or they have to compound a drug, they have to know what other drugs you are on for conflicts that could kill you. They also teach you how to take the drugs correctly.
Why do people who have no fucking clue make comments?
There are a lot of bad prescriptions to be honest. The amount of people who are prescribed both Adderall and large fills of benzos is too damn high.
don’t forget all those opiods the MDs told us were non-addictive.
That was a shame. Because now we have gone the opposite direction and they are massively under prescribed to who need it.
They aren’t even that addictive. Look up addiction rates for people prescribed them legitimately. But saying they were non addictive is obviously fucked up… Pharma reps were literally gaslighting doctors into thinking that they just weren’t prescribing enough and that’s why their patients were having pain, after 12 hours. Definitely not withdrawal symptoms
Excuses are the one thing that’s always in stock. Ask your doctor if ℞cuse is right for you.
https://www.inhousepharmacy.vu/
https://www.alldaychemist.com/Some old school sites that allow ordering of certain rx medicines without an rx. You can’t order scheduled substances like opioids, but they have a lot of common prescription medications.
I tagged you at some point with “knows his shit” and youve yet to disappoint.
Please. Knows HER shit! :D
The tag has been updated, haha
contrast this me picking up my dog’s prescription meds: “ah, shit, that was his last pill!” <calls vet office> “hey, could I get a refill of gabapentin and vetmedin? Let’s toss in some canned food. Sure, I can swing by after work. Thanks!”
From my point of view, the difference is there’s no insurance involved, so I pay out of pocket and no one has to deal with insurance companies. (pet insurance exists, but I’ve done the math and it doesn’t make financial or logistical sense for me.)
I do like my human pharmacy, but all my human meds are generic and not super controlled or abusable. I gave up on ADHD meds.
Blaming pharmacists for things they have no control over, nice. Biggest brain
Oh, is Walgreen’s your pharmacy too?
They learned from all of the mechanics, plumbers, construction crews and electricians. While most of the rest of the world goes broke these folks will do okay. I once called a company to look at a window that needed replacing and the first thing he said when he walked up is “Your shingles are starting to curl”. I went with another company who was more reputable, charged me fairly, and did good work. It’s tough out there.
But are you sure your shingles aren’t starting to curl? Maybe the other one just didn’t have a shingles guy so they don’t give a fuck about your curled shingles
Clearly he put a curling iron to his shingles for that fancy curled shingle look. Why would he want that fixed?
