Welcome to the club pharmacy colleagues. Replace “prescriptions” with “patients”, and you get an accurate description of what doctors have been going through for years (expletives replaced in the quote):
So we already are giving away a valuable service for free rather than just machine-gunning Rx’s out and making the store some money. Here is where the insurance companies take a good natured thing that we do for society, and bend us over for it. Medicare Part D is forcing many of the smaller independents out of business. AWP-95% + 0.01 (here is your 1 cent dispensing fee, just hand the pills out in ziplock baggies with the drug/patient name written in sharpie on the outside).So, stuck . . . between the Insurance companies and being the most benefit to society, we have painted ourselves in quite a corner. Our choices?
# Screw patient care, hammer out the Rx’s as fast as you can, and stay in business. Possibly [screw] up and kill someone in the process by a medication error.
vs
# Maintain patient care, be the most trusted profession, and flip burgers on the side because your store went out of business.
vs
# Charge for services, have patients go to corpo-chain X where they get treated like [garbage], but don’t have to pay the pharmacist for sorting out their pills because they dumped them all into a candy dish and forgot which ones is which.
