The Prescription

In order for me to write this post I have to reveal some medical information about my mother.  This TOTALLY goes against my beliefs in confidentiality, but in the interest of my faithful blog-followers here goes : ….My mother often suffers from….wait for it….heartburn.   And sometimes she finds relief from….brace yourselves….Nexium. 

OK – I got that out on the table.  Hopefully she’ll still be speaking to me if she ever reads this.

So today my mother emailed me asking for a medical favour.  My mother is the most APPROPRIATE mother of a doctor you could imagine.  Despite the fact that she lives with an ailing, slightly demented, vague and falling apart 82 year old, she very rarely calls me with medical questions.  In fact, I think the last time she asked me to look at something on my dad it turned out to be skin cancer.  And the time before that was back in 2005 when he had a massive GI bleed.

(By the end of this post I may as well attach their medical records for you to peruse…apparently my confidentiality conscience from paragraph one has gone out the window)

SO today my mother asked me to do her a favour because she has run out of her Nexium.  She didn’t want me to write her a prescription for fear that I would lose my license for prescribing to a family member so she suggested I COURIER her down some samples from the office.

COURIER them?

Seriously- - I wrote her back – let me PLAY THE ODDS on this one and take a CHANCE that the big hot shot King Doctor of the World doesn’t strike me down for writing you a prescription for some HEARTBURN tablets.  (I phrased it more politely than that).

NOT TO WORRY she wrote back an hour later, her doctor filled them for her over the phone.

She did?  This being the doctor who refused to give you your NORMAL lab results over the phone the day that your grandson was being intubated and shipped down to the ICU at Sick Kids and you couldn’t make your appointment?

Thinking I had some newfound respect for her doctor, I asked the question.

WHY did I ask the question?

Yes, it had been renewed over the phone and NOT TO WORRY, she didn’t even have to PAY for it because she had already paid the Annual $200 fee for over the phone prescription renewals.

SO…if you are a medical professional, I expect your blood to be boiling, and if you are not a medical professional, I am hopefully about to enlighten you on something….

There is NO REASON why you should have to pay $200 a YEAR for services you should be EXPECTED to have provided for you.  I mean, granted, family doctors can charge what they want for whatever they want, but SERIOUSLY, we’re in a RECESSION, family doctors make GOOD MONEY.  Not as much as any other area of medicine, but enough.  And we certainly should NOT be SCAMMING Patients into paying ridiculous amounts of money for “perks” like “prescription renewals over the phone”.  It would be like McDonalds charging and extra 50 cents for a smile with the happy meal.

And if you do the calculation (it was 5pm when my mom started me on this rant and I was tired and actually used a CALCULATOR to figure this out so I guarantee the following number to be ACCURATE)  for a family doctor with 1000 patients (which is conservative) their seemingly harmless $200 charge for “uninsured services” will make them $200,000 in revenue for the year.

Which is MORE than most family doctors make in a year for honest-to-goodness-this-is-why-I-went-to-medical-school work.

My suggestion to you if you are of the unlucky few who have a doctor who suggests a contribution to her $200,000 supplemental income :  call someone else…just, maybe, don't ask me to courier it to you...