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Why does it have to be so difficult to get daily medications?
I want to contrast two related but different things.
We have medications we take every day, unchanged for years. We seek regular medical attention to monitor our health and to ensure the medications are the right treatments.
We spend an incredible amount of time maintaining these medications:
- Every trip to every medical appointment includes a 10 minute pre-visit segment going over all the medications we take. If you take the same medications every day for years, somehow we ought to rely more on the Doctor changing the prescription plan than on the patient constantly refreshing the same database of information held by all the providers.
- We can only get a 30-day supply of these medications because of rules imposed by the insurance industry.
- The prescriptions expire, our Doctor’s close the office, nobody looks at our prescriptions proactively so we cannot get our medicine.
- The pharmacy and the 30-day rule meant that we had a prescription filled nearly every week. This meant multiple text messages, a trip to the pharmacy, all the overhead of getting the medicine and dealing with the “open” status of the pharmacy. We solved this issue by buying (out of pocket) “catch-up” supplies of medications so all our medications were refilled on the same day of each month.
The driving force to reduce this chaos is the patient. Why did I have to push the pharmacy to organize a plan to have one due date each month? It is in the interest of everyone to have this organized. Why is it OK to spend this much of my remaining time on this Earth focused on a supply of daily medication?
On the other hand, Fentanyl, Opiods, and Marijuana are casually available without a prescription. Why is it harder to get medications my Doctor wants me to take every day than it is to get illegal junk?
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