For those that don’t know, I have asthma. No biggie, I just use my medicine as I should and I’m OK. The symptoms come on, seemingly in a random fashion. In other words, I can’t (nor can doctors) predict when or why I have a flare up and have to have these medicines at hand.
Want to know why that matters to me, and will to you, eventually?
The first issue came about on obtaining the medicines. In an effort to curb the rapid rise of health care costs and to stop evil patients from abusing the Medicare/Medicaid/private insurance industry, Congress and Obama decided to put the crunch on wasteful prescribing and use of medicines.
This is the pharmaceutical side of death panels, by the way.
This is how it works. The doctor sees the patient and prescribes medications that are felt to be needed for up to the next 3 months. At the time of the doctor-patient visit, the doctor is under pressure to prescribe for the symptoms or diseases that need treatment, and in some cases, may need treatment in the next 6-12 months. As I pointed out to my doctor one year, he/we were dead wrong in our predictions on the degree the asthma would affect me that spring. I ran out of medicine, couldn’t get an appointment to see my doctor and had to resort to all manner of probably illegal methods of obtaining what I needed. I survived and we talked about this and he offered a solution.
Horde!
So my doctor’s solution to this congressional-caused chaos was to cheat the system. So I did. I insured that I had several inhalers on hand, in case the asthma symptoms returned at an inconvenient time for my doctor. But, here is a white elephant in the room. Packaged medicines don’t have an infinite shelf life. They expire. The co pay for the drug may be nothing or $75. Now what does one do? Use the expired drug and hope it works, or at least doesn’t kill you? Or, try to replace the expired drug with an unexpired unit?
The prescribing pharmacy refused to replace the unopened, unused and expired drug.
Enterprising fellow that I am, I decided to trace down the manufacture. In the old days, whenever that was, it was common practice for the pharmacy to replace expired, unused medications. The manufacture of one particular drug that I needed was GlaxcoSmithKline of Canada. I googled (which makes it official that I’m a google doc) GSK and read their online replacement policy.
Great, “No return authorization required.”
Just send the drug(s) to the address provided. So, I grabbed up the 4 unopened, unused units of medicine and went to the post office. That’s the United States Postal Service. The one that requires me to fill out a United States Customs Service form to declare what I was sending to this foreign country. Oops, another white elephant in the room. As of just recently, they, the USPS, will not ship prescription drugs through their service, by act of Congress. Sorry bud.
Do you know why our august Congress decided to make it illegal to ship prescription drugs?
Well, let me tell you. It’s for a variety of reasons but the last straw is the opioid crisis. Truthfully, a little more than just opioids, but drugs of abuse in general. See, one of the major avenues of illegal drugs into the US is only partly due to the absence of a wall on our southern border. Other major avenues include the USPS, UPS, FedEx and the like. The WWW, the Internet, Google. K2 (synthetic marijuana), anabolic steroids, opioids, Viagra and a host of other medications have been flowing south for years. It’s a cost issue as well as an access issue.
My expired, unused asthma medication cost me a pretty penny in co-pay ($300). It was prescribed by a US doctor, dispensed from a US based pharmacy (probably the largest in the US) that had obtained it from a Canadian based USCS approved importer of pharmaceuticals into the US and I can’t get it replaced through the company approved system because our US Congress thinks I’m importing (exporting?) illegal drugs, or at least facilitating others to do so!
Now we are down to the point of all this. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it and then what would you do?” There are versions in all the major religions and folklore. In the mid-twentieth century, Robert K Merton, an American Sociologist, coined, “The law of unintended consequences.” Plagiarism at its best.
Another witticism. We want to stop illegal drug abuse, illegal immigration, gun violence, rolling stops at busy intersections or whatever. Just pass another law, that’ll fix it.
Your grumpy Uncle Dave.
Weary.