Injured patients can’t get their painkillers; an unexpected consequence of pill mill crackdown
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – The pill mill crackdown is cutting overdose deaths, but it’s also having unintended consequences for patients in pain.
Injured patients tell the Consumer Watchdog they can’t get their medication because pharmacy after pharmacy turned them away. One patient with an injured shoulder went to 14 pharmacies.
“They wouldn’t tell me when it was coming in. They wouldn’t hold the prescription and fill it. They wouldn’t order it. They wouldn’t substitute anything,” patient Jackie Larson explained.
She finally had to get her doctor to help her get her pain medication.
“Everyone treated you like a patient in pain except the pharmacies. We have a new glitch in our medical care system that needs to be corrected,” said Larson.
The Consumer Watchdog looks at what can be done to fix the problem. “Prescription Impossible” Monday on NewsChannel 5 at 11.
Filed under: General Problems
I do not think this consequence was unintended. This is going according to the plan laid out in the deep pages of the Affordable Care Act–which I supported–way back where no one read it before the bill passed. Now to remove it would look like easing a path for pill pushers. I don’t think there will BE any going back from this.
Please refer everyone to the section and chapter in ACA so we can all look for ourselves. I don’t believe it is associated because the problem preceded the Health Law. Prove me wrong.
The unintended consequence that will probably hurt society the most is that users who cannot find opiates legitimately will turn to heroin. There’s currently a significant cluster of new AIDS and Hepatitis C cases in Indiana due to needle-sharing among new heroin addicts. Thanks to the chaos in Iraq, there have been bumper crops of opium the last few years – heroin is plentiful and cheaper than oxycontin.
The 5-year survival rate for iv drug abusers is as bad as for many cancers.