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or is it an irrational Fear of Addiction Phobia that makes us afraid when other addictions: alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines are more dangerous. He “takes drugs” dependent on which drug. Two classes of addiction are presented for the first time to begin to understand the horrible pain refugee crisis
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https://stockdailydish.com/how-the-nhs-wont-give-mother-life-extending-cancer-drug/
Bonnie Fox was denied a vital drug on cost grounds
Bonnie Fox is dying. In April 2015 she gave birth to Barnaby, her first child. Four months later her joy turned to horror when, after experiencing problems breastfeeding, she was diagnosed with advanced and incurable breast cancer.
That was 19 months ago. Since then Bonnie, 39, has been through six months of debilitating chemotherapy and is now on the twin ‘maintenance’ drugs, Herceptin and Perjeta.
For how long is anyone’s guess — ‘the longest I have heard is 12 years, but I have also heard of women for whom they’ve stopped working after a year’, says Bonnie, from Croydon, Surrey.
Juggling treatments and baby-care, Bonnie has returned two days a week to her demanding job as a project manager, and in June last year she married her partner and Barnaby’s father, Ash, the manager of a Waterstones book store.
Now she has one all-consuming ambition: to live long enough to be there for Barnaby’s first day at school.
Her best hope of that is an ‘end-of-life’ drug called Kadcyla, which ‘would buy me more time with my little boy . . . with Kadcyla I might even see him get to school, which, for me, would be a huge milestone to reach’.
But Bonnie can’t have Kadcyla. On December 29, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) announced that, at a cost of £90,000 for each of the 1,200 patients who, like Bonnie, could benefit from the drug, the price was ‘too high in relation to the benefits it gives for it to be recommended for routine commissioning in the NHS’.
‘Cheated once’ by fate, Bonnie says she now feels ‘cheated again: I was relying on that drug’.
Then she read the news that the NHS is paying silly money for other drugs which, with joined-up negotiating, it could be getting for far less.
As much as £380 million a year is being wasted by GPs alone because they’re paying over the odds for drugs that have had their prices hiked by pharmaceutical companies, according to Dr Andrew Hill, a senior research fellow in pharmacology at the University of Liverpool.
The fault, he says, lies with NHS England for failing to track and act over these price hikes.
And that’s just prescriptions in the community in England. Factor in hospitals and all prescribing in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, says Dr Hill, and ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re talking about a billion pounds here in overcharging’.
Dr Hill’s team analysed prices paid for 300 drugs from 2011 to 2015. The biggest price rise they found was the 2,340 per cent increase in the cost of the thyroid drug carbimazole, which cost the NHS an extra £29.8 million in 2015. The cost of the antidepressant drug nortriptyline went up 419 per cent in the same period, landing the NHS with an additional bill of £25.5 million.
‘You would think the NHS would be able to control this,’ Dr Hill told Good Health. ‘This is such an easy opportunity to save money.’
And when you consider the hopes of patients such as Bonnie, this waste is simply immoral.
‘I’m very pro the NHS, it’s been wonderful to me and my family, and I do appreciate it has so many conflicting demands,’ says Bonnie. ‘But when I hear about wastage like this, it is so frustrating.’
One of the many ironies of waste is that while some patients are being denied treatments the NHS can’t afford, others are getting care they don’t need.
As Professor Terence Stephenson, chairman of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, has put it: ‘One doctor’s waste is another patient’s . . . lack of treatment.’
The healthcare think tank, The King’s Fund, has highlighted 16 NICE guidelines about sticking to treatments that actually work which, if followed across the NHS, could save £1.9 million per 100,000 of population — in England alone that’s a saving in excess of £1 billion.
Some of the useless, wasteful treatments and procedures given to patients include X-rays for diagnosing lower back pain, and a plaster cast on small wrist fractures in children.
These ‘will heal just as quickly with a removable splint’, according to a report published last October by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. The academy published a list of 40 treatments and procedures ‘of little or no benefit to patients’, but costly to the NHS.
For example, it said, tap water ‘is just as good for cleaning cuts and grazes as saline solution’.
Sometimes these needless — and wasteful — treatments can do more harm than good. As reported in the Mail last month, 800,000 people in the UK have been on antidepressants for two years or more, with no clinical reason for taking them.
Similarly, an estimated 250,000 people have been on highly addictive tranquillisers for months or even years, despite clear official guidance that no one should take them for longer than four weeks.
Apart from the financial cost (the combined bill to the NHS of the over-prescription of antidepressants, tranquillisers and opioid painkillers may be £160 million every year) there is the human cost to the thousands left to struggle alone with dependency and withdrawal.
Chris Ham, chief executive of The King’s Fund, says that while evidence suggested the NHS was ‘one of the most efficient health systems in the world’, there is ‘still significant scope to improve productivity and reduce waste’.
With the NHS facing ‘huge financial pressures’ it was ‘essential to focus on getting the best possible value for patients from every pound spent . . . for example, through addressing the overuse of certain drugs and treatments or [ensuring] patients are seen faster and don’t need to stay in hospital for so long.’
More galling, perhaps, is the money wasted on the significant variation in executive pay and perks. Take John Adler, chief executive at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. From just over £245,000 in the financial year to 2015, his total salary and pension package almost doubled the following year to a whopping £485,000 — an astonishing increase of almost 98 per cent.
Yet the trust’s financial review for that year conceded, it had ‘not met all of our financial and performance duties for 2015/16’ and it recorded a deficit of £34.1 million.
What’s more, a Good Health investigation last month revealed Adler’s trust was one of the ten with the largest number of medication errors in NHS England — 2,449 in 2015, causing harm to patients in 185 cases.
In most cases, such errors were blamed by experts on unsafe staffing levels among nurses.
The trust says Adler gets the going rate for the job. Tell that to the chief executive at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, who has almost 3,000 more staff to manage than Adler’s 14,000, yet gets a more modest £272,000 pay-and-pension package.
It’s a similar story at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where the chief executive struggled by on £250,000 less than Mr Adler and has 2,000 more staff to manage.
Mr Adler’s not the only senior manager doing well. A survey of boardroom pay in the NHS last year found that 355 trust directors in England received average salary increases of 2.3 per cent — considerably more than the 1 per cent pay cap imposed on nurses since 2010.
A spokesman for NHS Improvement, the organisation that oversees trusts, said that while the NHS ‘needs strong and capable leaders to meet the challenges it faces’, when it comes to executive pay levels ‘we expect trusts to exercise restraint and we strongly discourage new appointments at the highest pay levels’.
Yet another form of waste that costs the patient and the NHS dear is infection rates. Infections cost money because of the extra surgery and care involved. Infection rates vary wildly, for no obvious good reason. And so do other costly things.
In September 2016, Public Health England identified 102 inexplicable ‘unwarranted variations’, many of which were costing the NHS money. For example, it found that for no obvious reason, the number of days patients being kept in hospital after fracturing a thigh bone ranged from ten to more than 30.
The longer stay, which simply isn’t necessary, increases the risk of contracting hospital infections and blocks beds badly needed by other patients.
And the NHS is in the grip of yet another hugely ambitious IT project, with hospitals poised to plough millions of pounds into new systems, converting hospitals, GPs and pharmacies to electronic records, online appointments and prescriptions to make the NHS paperless by 2020.
It’s as though the disastrous £10 billion National Programme for IT, introduced in 2002 with exactly the same ambitions and finally scrapped barely four years ago, never happened.
NEXT WEEK: How the NHS could save millions simply by saying sorry when things go wrong.
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WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and John Kennedy (R-LA) today, in a letter to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Acting Administrator Uttam Dhillon, called on DEA to use its new authorities—passed into law by Durbin and Kennedy last year—to prevent and limit opioid diversion by properly regulating the pharmaceutical industry and appropriately reducing opioid production quotas for 2020. In its 2020 proposal, DEA explained it would only lower opioid production quotas based upon reported theft loss and seizures, an inadequate reflection of the abuse, overdose, and public health harms created by excessively high production levels that the DEA approves for drug manufacturers. The Senators urged DEA to better comply with the 2018 law they passed and not to ignore important health information when setting new opioid production quotas.
“We fear that the explanation provided by DEA for ignoring the clear connection between the staggering volumes of painkillers approved for production and the current overdose epidemic signals that DEA is reverting to the short-sighted approach that precipitated this opioid crisis. The statute is clear that DEA must exercise its quota authority to serve as a gatekeeper and weigh the public health impact of how many opioids it allows to be sold each year in the United States,” Durbin and Kennedy wrote.
Between 1993 and 2015, the DEA allowed production of oxycodone to increase 39-fold, hydrocodone to increase 12-fold, and fentanyl to increase 25-fold. As a result, the number of opioid pain relievers dispensed in the United States skyrocketed. The increase in opioid-related overdose deaths has mirrored the dramatic rise in opioid prescribing, with more than 42,000 deaths in 2016.
Last year, after passage of Durbin and Kennedy’s Opioid Quota Reform Act of 2018, DEA was granted new authorities that enhanced its opioid quota-setting authority by improving transparency and enabling DEA to adjust quotas to prevent opioid diversion and abuse while ensuring an adequate supply for legitimate medical needs. This is the first year DEA set quotas with the new requirements passed into law. Yesterday, Durbin and Kennedy secured an amendment in the Fiscal Year 2020 Commerce, Justice, and Science funding bill to provide DEA with additional tools to limit the over-production of prescription painkillers.
After two decades of dramatic increases to the volume of opioids allowed to come to the market, the DEA has heeded Durbin and Kennedy’s repeated calls over the past several years to help prevent opioid addiction by responsibly reducing nearly all opioid quotas. In part resulting from their efforts with DEA, five powerful, addictive painkillers are set to see a significant reduction in 2020 from what was allowed on the market just four years prior, including a 48 percent cut to oxycodone production over four years; a 59 percent cut to hydrocodone production over four years; and a 65 percent cut to fentanyl production over four years.
Full text of today’s letter is available here and below:
November 1, 2019
Dear Acting Administrator Dhillon:
We write to comment on the proposed 2020 aggregate production quotas for controlled substances that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) published on September 12. As DEA finalizes the 2020 aggregate production quotas for schedule II opioids, we strongly urge the agency to consider the public health crisis caused by the opioid epidemic and meaningfully reduce opioids quotas from 2019 levels, as proposed in the Federal Register notice.
As our nation confronts the worst drug overdose epidemic in its history, we write to urge the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to tackle the opioid crisis by utilizing new authorities that Congress provided to establish more sensible opioid production quotas for 2020. The Opioid Quota Reform Act, which was signed into law as Section 3282 of the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (P.L. 115-271), strengthened DEA’s statutory quota-setting authority by enhancing transparency and requiring opioid quotas to be adjusted to reflect diversion, overdose deaths, and public health. As the bipartisan authors of that legislation, we strongly encourage you to use this new authority to rein in the pharmaceutical industry’s incessant demand for excessive levels of opioid production.
We have previously shared our deep concern that, between 1993 and 2015, DEA allowed aggregate production quotas for oxycodone to increase 39-fold, hydrocodone to increase 12-fold, hydromorphone to increase 23-fold, and fentanyl to increase 25-fold. Recent reporting from the Washington Post revealed that the pharmaceutical industry flooded every corner of the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills between 2006 and 2012—outsized and unjustifiable volumes of painkiller production undertaken with DEA approval and awareness.
The October 1 report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General specifically highlighted that, while the opioid epidemic surged, “DEA was authorizing manufacturers to product substantially larger amounts of opioids.” While we appreciate the initial steps taken in recent years to reduce the aggregate production quotas for schedule II opioids, we remain concerned that they are still far too high.
Approximately thirteen billion opioid doses were put on the market in 2017—enough for every adult American to have at least a three-week prescription of painkillers. As powerful painkillers are aggressively marketed and prescribed at high rates, this sheer volume of available opioids heightens the risk for illicit diversion and abuse. For example, four in five new heroin users first began their addiction with prescription painkillers.
DEA explained in its proposed rule that its estimate of diversion—for the purpose of setting the aggregate production quotas—was based upon reported theft loss and seizures, and that DEA could not use Medicaid sales data or drug overdose and death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While we appreciate the challenges in directly linking patient overdoses to a specific controlled substance, DEA cannot ignore or discard this essential information from the quota-setting process. DEA stated that, “illicit manufacturing cannot be tempered by adjusting the aggregate production quotas”, but this fails to acknowledge the potential impact that such adjustments may have on illicit demand.
We fear that the explanation provided by DEA for ignoring the clear connection between the staggering volumes of painkillers approved for production and the current overdose epidemic signals that DEA is reverting to the short-sighted approach that precipitated this opioid crisis. The statute is clear that DEA must exercise its quota authority to serve as a gatekeeper and weigh the public health impact of how many opioids it allows to be sold each year in the United States.
As DEA finalizes the opioid production quotas for 2020, we urge you to apply DEA’s new authorities to prevent and limit opioid diversion due to excessively high production levels. Thank you for your commitment to addressing the opioid epidemic. We look forward to our continued engagement on this issue.
Sincerely,
According to this website https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-adults-live-usa-b830ecdfb6047660 there is abt 248 million adults in the USA..
Using the numbers in this article In 2016, the pharmaceutical industry put 14 billion opioid doses on the market—enough for every adult to have a one-month supply
Using those numbers means that each adult would get abt 60 doses of a opiate.
Using the normal number of chronic pain pts being 100 million… so it would suggests that abt 40% of the adults are chronic pain pts.
So if anyone wanted to do the math for 100 million chronic pain pts taking one opiate dose twice a day (60 doses/month) they would need 72 BILLION doses of opiates. Abt FIVE TIMES what Sen Durbin & Kennedy believes is an excessive amount of opiate production.
Within that 72 billion doses, does not provide any opiate doses for acute pain management… a hard to calculate number.
To put it another way… presuming that SIXTY DOSES/MONTH would provide adequate pain management for the 100 million chronic pain pts… ONLY ONE IN FIVE (20%) CHRONIC PAIN PTS would get adequate pain management.
Of course, there is no mention as to what mgs or what opiates they came up with this excessive opiate production.
It is also stated in the letter that in a SEVEN YEAR PERIOD pharmaceutical industry flooded every corner of the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills between 2006 and 2012. The pharmas produced enough oxycodone & Hydrocodone to potentially provide adequate pain management for chronic pain pts for a ONE YEAR PERIOD…again no provision for pts dealing with acute pain nor any considerations for high impact/intractable chronic pain pts nor pts that are fast/ultra fast metabolizers that need higher and/or more frequent doses.
Within the time frames that they claim there was excessive opiate production was during the “Decade of pain” that encourage prescribers to treat pain as the “5th vital sign” in a bill/law from the 106th Congress https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/2260
This seems to follow a pattern with Congress… in 1914 they passed the Harrison Narcotic Act – which created the “black drug market” and then in 1970 they passed the Controlled Substance Act that declared a “war on drugs” that the 1914 act created… then in 2000 the “Decade of Pain” encourage prescribers to treat pain as the “5th vital sign”… now we are seeing Congress attempting to take corrective action from the outcomes of the 2000 law.
Maybe it is this sort of things that caused Einstein to create his infamous definition of “insanity” ? 
Or is Congress like a dog chasing their tail, expending a lot of energy and revenue and getting no where ?
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https://www.ncpanet.org/newsroom/qam/2019/12/17/texas-commissioners-mail-order-is-more-expensive
Commissioners in Collin County, Texas, had long incentivized their employees to use mail order, and even limited 90-day fills to mail order. After extensive analysis, they found that
That is before considering that the county paid for the third month’s fill and delivery fees. Commissioners recently changed their policy so county employees could get 90-day fills at retail and removed all incentives for employees to use mail order. County employees now have a choice. Here’s a video of the commissioners’ discussion on employee benefits for 2020 here
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/17/health/opioid-overdose-death-suicide-study/index.html
Since 1999, significant increases in US suicide rates have paralleled increases in drug overdoses from opioids. Experts have wondered how much the two might be intertwined, estimating that the
The suicide rate in the United States has seen sharp increases in recent years. Studies have shown that the risk of suicide declines sharply when people call the national suicide hotline: 1-800-273-TALK.
There is also a crisis text line. For crisis support in Spanish, call 1-888-628-9454.
The lines are staffed by a mix of paid professionals and unpaid volunteers trained in crisis and suicide intervention. The confidential environment, the 24-hour accessibility, a caller’s ability to hang up at any time and the person-centered care have helped its success, advocates say.
Olfson and his colleagues analyzed mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System from 2000 to 2017, looking specifically at unintentional or accidental deaths, suicides and deaths of undetermined cause, and tallying those associated with opioids.
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DEA Obtusely Uses High School Wrestler‘s Death To Promote Anti-Drug Websitea high school wrestler who started taking Oxycodone as a senior. His doctor prescribed it to him after a shoulder injury that ended his wrestling career. At 21, he died from a fentanyl overdose. It is adviced for Yakima wrongful death lawyers for hire , if they need to fight for wrongful death or wrongful injury cases.
That these two things are related is all but a foregone conclusion. In 2015, the same year Gintis died, 52,000 Americans died of an overdose. In two-thirds of those cases, the drugs were opioids. The connection between high school athletics and prescriptions to potential gateway drugs like Oxycodone or Ocycontin is understudied but increasingly .
Tessie Castillo, the advocacy and communications coordinator for the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, believes Gintis was a victim of this connection. “What we see a lot, over and over again, is people getting injured and they go to the doctor and they’re prescribed pills and that’s the start of their addiction,” she told Yahoo. “It’s very connected to sports.”
Gintis’s mother, Marsha, seems to agree. She recently spoke at the North Carolina state legislature on behalf of the STOP act, targeting the over-prescription of pain killers. In recounting Gintis’s story she said, “Like so many others who now struggle with substance-abuse disorders, a prescription for opioids after suffering an athletic injury served as the catalyst for his downward spiral and ultimately his death.”Death cannot be compensated. However, the injury lawyers – The Rizzuto Law Firm can help you get anything you deserve if you or your loved ones suffered an injury.
In this context, it’s weird to see the DEA latching onto the story with this tweet:
The DEA is quote-tweeting its own affiliate account—one that pays lip service to drug prevention and does mention the wrestling injury—to unsuccessfully (their typo’d link leads to an unsecure site) promote It’s just a tweet, but it manages to be insensitive and ignorant at the same time. Blaming Gintis’s death on a one-time decision to take up drugs ignores the greater context of his tragedy, and oversimplifies a growing epidemic in ways that only make it harder to properly understand and deal with it.
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Michigan sues Walgreens, other drug companies for causing opioid crisisThe state of Michigan Tuesday filed a lawsuit against drug companies for damages caused by the opioid epidemic.
The suit, filed in Wayne County Circuit Court, charges McKesson Corporation, Cardinal Health Inc., AmerisourceBergen Corporation, and Walgreens with creating the opioid epidemic by flooding the market with prescription pain pills and for selling the drugs without oversight, causing them to be easily diverted for illegal use.
Michigan is the first state in the nation to sue drug companies as drug dealers, according to the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Tuesday’s suit was filed under the Drug Dealer Liability Act which allows for civil damages against people who participate in the illegal marketing of controlled substances — and may be a way around an existing Michigan law that makes it difficult to sue drug companies over drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administation.
The suit seeks damages for the increased costs of law enforcement and prosecution associated with the epidemic. It also seeks damages for health care costs, costs associated with early childhood education and special education for children born addicted to the drugs, drug treatment costs and other losses created by illegal drug use.
Linda Davis, a retired Clinton Township district court judge who oversaw its drug court and now serves as executive director of Families Against Narcotics, hailed the suit as a good move. “Pharmaceutical companies knew that these drugs were addictive,” she said. They miseducated and misadvertised to doctors. They truly went beyond just prescribing FDA-approved drugs. They misinformed the public.”
Monique Stanton, who is president of CARE of Southeastern Michigan — a social services agency that among other things works to support and educate people impacted by drugs — said communities are being devastated financially fighting the opioid epidemic. “We are spending huge amounts of resources, whether it’s in the schools .. law enforcement. … Our local communities are significantly burdened with crating new strategies to address the epidemic.”
She hoped that in addition to potentially bringing financial resources back to the state, the lawsuit would also force a change in policy. “When you look at things that happened with the tobacco industry, after a lot of those lawsuits, that’s when you began to see some significant changes” such as smoking bans and changes in the way tobacco was marketed. “I would expect to see some similar things related to the opioid epidemic,” she said, suggesting that when doctors prescribe an opioid, they require the user to also carry naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses.
Citing a report from the Washington Post, the attorney general’s office said nearly 3 billion opioid pills made it to Michigan between 2006 and 2012. When prescriptions ran out — many doctors have grown reluctant to prescribe them — or the cost of obtaining the pills on the street grew too expensive, addicts switched to heroin, which is less expensive than pills. Except now, most of the heroin supply is tainted with the ultra-powerful — and extremely inexpensive — synthetic opioid fentanyl. Fentanyl and its analogs are responsible for the majority of opioid overdose deaths in Michigan and throughout the country.
Opioid overdoses account for about 5 1/2 deaths a day in Michigan. In 2018, 2,036 people died from opioid overdoses, down a minuscule .8% from 2,053 in 2017.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said she wants to reduce the number of opioid overdose deaths by 50% over the next five years.
While many municipalities across the state have sued drug makers for the crisis, Tuesday’s action represents the first suit filed by the state of Michigan
Contact Georgea Kovanis: gkovanis@freepress.com
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My blog is now in its 8th year and it took me five plus years to get ONE MILLION total page views and the second one million page views took only TWO YEARS. Thanks to my many loyal readers. I have learned much from those who have made comments or reached out to me via email, FB messenger, text or phone calls. I hope that other chronic painers have learned something from the nearly 8200 posts that I made since my blogs beginnings.
I have tried to educate and motivate chronic painers to advocate for themselves and I have tried to be very straight forward with what I have shared that others have written or produced videos and hopefully most all realize that I don’t have a hidden agenda nor tried to use some others to make myself more visible and/or seemingly more important than anyone else.
As we enter a new year and a new decade… that this year/decade proves to be much better for those chronic painers than the decade we are leaving behind.
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https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/12/17/us/17reuters-cvs-lawsuit.html
NEW YORK — CVS Health Corp and its Omnicare unit were sued on Tuesday by the U.S. government, which accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and other programs for drugs for older and disabled people without valid prescriptions.
The Department of Justice joined whistleblower litigation accusing Omnicare of violating the federal False Claims Act for illegally dispensing drugs to tens of thousands of patients in assisted living facilities, group homes for people with special needs, and other long-term care facilities.
According to a civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Omnicare would often assign new numbers to prescriptions after the original prescriptions expired or ran out of refills.
The government said this enabled Omnicare to bill Medicare Medicaid, and Tricare, which serves military personnel, for hundreds of thousands of drugs, under what the company internally called “rollover” prescriptions, from 2010 to 2018.
Many of the drugs were anticonvulsants, antidepressants and antipsychotics and treated serious conditions such as dementia, depression and heart disease, and sometimes had dangerous side effects requiring supervision by doctors, the government said.
“A pharmacy’s fundamental obligation is to ensure that drugs are dispensed only under the supervision of treating doctors who monitor patients’ drug therapies,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in Manhattan said in a statement.
“Omnicare put at risk the health of tens of thousands of elderly and disabled individuals living in assisted living and other residential long-term care facilities,” he added.
The lawsuit seeks civil penalties and other damages.
CVS, one of the largest U.S. drugstore chains and pharmacy benefit managers, said it did not believe the claims had merit, and that it intended to defend itself in court.
“We are confident that Omnicare’s dispensing practices will be found to be consistent with state requirements and industry-accepted practices,” the company said in a statement.
CVS, based in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, bought Omnicare in 2015 for about $10.4 billion.
The government joined a lawsuit originally brought in June 2015 by Uri Bassan, a pharmacist who worked for Omnicare in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It said Omnicare’s compliance department had acknowledged the dispensing problem internally two months earlier, when a regional officer expressed concern in an email that its systems allowed rollover prescriptions “without any documentation or pharmacist intervention.”
The False Claims Act lets whistleblowers sue on behalf of the federal government, and share in recoveries.
Twenty-nine U.S. states and the District of Columbia are also named as plaintiffs.
The cases is U.S. ex rel. Bassan v. Omnicare Inc, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-04179.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)
This article is confusing to me… particularly about the issue involving long term care (Nursing homes)
I used to work as a temp for 5-6 yrs at one of the Omnicare’s pharmacy/distribution centers and I also served a few nursing homes when we had our own independent pharmacy.
Nursing homes don’t work on “prescriptions” – except for controlled substances – they work on physician orders. Most nursing homes have two levels of care ICF (intermediary care facility) or SNF (skilled nursing facility) .
As I remember a ICF pt has to have their med orders reviewed and signed every 60 days by their physician and a SNF pt has to have that done every 30 days.
When it came to controlled meds Rxs… we could no longer take orders from the nursing staff in the nursing home… per the DEA they were no longer consider a legal agent of the prescriber.
The Pharmacist would call or text the prescriber, generally there was just a couple of prescribers – one being the medical director for the home – that cared for all the pts in the home.. We got on a first name basis with most of these prescribers… and we would tell the doc that Mrs Smith’s prescription for this controlled med and the prescriber would authorize us to rewrite it and typically put the max number of refills as allowed by law.
If a C-II med was involved, the technician in the control room tracked that the prescriber got a signed Rx back to the pharmacy within 10 days. The flow was pretty much very well organized and tracking to make sure that all the “i’s” were dotted and “t’s” were crossed…
I retired from working in pharmacy mid -2013 so I don’t know what changes that CVS had implemented since they acquired Omnicare in 2015, but this whistle blower case goes back to 2010. The 5 or 6 years that I worked as a temp at Omnicare… other distribution centers had some paperwork issues with the DEA but the center I worked at must have been much better organized and had all their ducks in a row.
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