Maddening Medo

***Not a whole lot of sunshine around here, but I think I’ll be feeling better soon. This is a normal period during the recovery when my brain is sick of being sick, I want to get moving, but my body hasn’t gotten the message. It will pass. Just be patient and enjoy my anger until peace returns. Happy weekend.”
I’m being forced to use medco due to our insurance guidelines. If you are not familiar with this, it is a mail order pharmacy.
According to Fortune Magazine Oct. 27 2008 “Medco is a big bio bet.” Among the world’s most admired companies Medco placed third after Nike & Apple.
Big surprise, this place came out of no where. Medco’s business is “reducing drug costs for employers and health-care-plans. The company shows “how important it is for a middleman to take risks and find new ways of doing business.”
“Medco’s innovations ultimately could translate into new revenue.” Remember, we’re reading fortune magazine, as in “How to Make Lots of Money” magazine.
The third most admired worldly company is a pharmaceutical company that gives discounts to big businesses and health-care-plans, but has kept, or will increase, the cost to the consumer.
Medco’s success is bad news for the ill.
Due to one diagnosis, Chronic Interstitial Pulmonary Disease, among the thousands of pages of charting regarding me, I am not able to get Tussionex over the counter.
Medco considers this a symptomatic treatment for a chronic disease. They will reimburse for two over the counter scripts in one years time, after that, it needs to be mail ordered or I will pay full price.
Except, I don’t have any chronic lung disease. I have a virus. I may get another virus. This medication should be labeled under “as needed treatment” not “treatment for a chronic condition.”
But it is, because they want to make more money off me. Sucks for me and the rest of patients, but they do have a plus.
Medco is currently researching how to use genetic information to determine dosing in hopes of lowering the occurrence of overdosing. The goal is to save health care providers 1.1 million a year.
I love the idea of including genetic coding to create individual care plans and doses. If this was the company’s main goal, I would be sold.
It’s not. The goal is to make money. The article is saying “invest in us! We’ll make you money.” They will, feel free to research medco for your portfolios, but acknowledge that profits come at the cost of delaying care.
Tussionex is a medication I would want immediately to treat my symptoms, since I can’t go to the pharmacy, I’ll call and wait a week to receive it. I’ll be miserable and untreated for one full week.
Medco has outright missed and forgotten to mail prescriptions, specifically, my metoprolol, a beta blocker cardiac medications which prevents many from having heart attacks or arrhythmias. This problem could increase health care cost in the long run. A week with out a beta blocker could send people to the hospital with heart attacks. You can imagine how much a heart attack costs, but that’s not medco’s problem. That’s somebody elses problem, specifically the ER staffs, the hospitals, the patients, and their family.
Just something to think about.