Recently, I connected with the daughter of a transplant patient. Her mother was facing an emergency after a recent discharge at the hospital. The hospital staff called her mom's medications into the mail-order pharmacy while the patient was awaiting discharge and the medications were supposed to be at the patient's house soon thereafter.
Keep in mind transplant patient's lives depend on medications every 12 hours or else their bodies may start to fight off the transplanted organ.
Although the medications showed delivered, the medications were not received. The package of medications was now one of the millions of packages that are stolen each year. The daughter reached out for help, but help didn't come soon enough. The patient ran out of her medications causing a life-threatening issue.
Thankfully, the patient's daughter was able to help and connected the mother with a local/independent pharmacy and medications were able to be filled immediately. How many people get into these situations without anyone to help them?
Often, patients don't know their organ donor unless it is an arranged donation. In this case, the mother received the gift of life by her son. (Many may not realize that someone can donate a portion of their liver to a patient and the liver will regenerate/grow back to a fully functional liver for both the donor and the recipient.) This mother had also lost a son several years earlier. They are not unfamiliar with loss and they cherish each other. This needless risk has awoken them as it has many of us to the many risks of mail order pharmacy.
In this case and as many others do, the patient/caregiver went to a local/independent pharmacy to save the day. Our brick and mortar stores are playing the heroes role every single day when these issues occur every day due to forced mail order pharmacy. Unlike mail-order pharmacy, they can often fill the same day for emergency situations like these. Independent pharmacies are closing rapidly due to forced mail order pharmacy & low reimbursements from the same insurance company's pharmacy benefit manager that often forces patients to use THIER OWNED mail order pharmacy. Please let your legislatures know we need a fair playing field and coverage for our locally owned independent pharmacies!
With the many risks of mail-order pharmacy, I advocate that no one should ever be forced to use this as the ONLY option of coverage. I advocate for choice. Please sign and share if you agree.
Thank you for your support,
Loretta Boesing
If you are willing to share your story with representatives in your state/federal government, please email me your concerns:
Email: stopmandatorymailorder@yahoo.com
Twitter: @BoesingLoretta
Facebook Page: Issues with Mail Order Pharmacy
@justamomwholovesherson
Link to the original petition: https://www.change.org/p/attn-all-legistlatures-state-board-of-pharmacies-ban-mail-order-drug-mandates-from-all-health-insurance-plans-monitor
The statistics of package thefts in the photo comes from a research study by August Home can be found here: https://august.com/blogs/home/research-package-theft-report