Pecking at nothing

Apparently Medicaid is now requiring all nursing homes to return "left over" medications:

CMS has ordered state Medicaid programs to require nursing homes to return unused medications to pharmacies and to ensure Medicaid is repaid for unused treatments when nursing home patients die, are discharged or have their prescriptions changed, according to a March 22 letter, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. In the letter, Dennis Smith, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations at CMS, also wrote that state Medicaid programs should limit the amount of medications provided to nursing homes at one time to "help to curtail prescription drug waste."

It's not that anything is particularly wrong with with this program, but honestly, this is how we're going to cut back on waste in health care?  By ordering nursing homes to return medications? 

How much money will this actually save anyways?  Particularly once you factor in the administrative costs of such a program. 

It's just such a backward way of controlling costs.  Random comparison: my home state of Kansas recently legalized concealed weapons.   Some advocates claim that concealed weapons actually make people safer because "criminals" will be less likely to draw guns or use force because the person they're trying to rob/kill might have a concealed weapon.   Well, I guess on some weird planet that logic makes sense.  But not compared to simply much tighter gun control laws to get guns out of people's hands, period. 

Comments

[SteveE]

This has to be a gag -- anyone check "Smoking Gun"? I had a summer job long ago working for a big pharma company. My job -- no joke -- was to sit in a secure wire cage inside a huge warehouse and open bottles of pills, tablets, capsules and liquid medicines that had been returned to us for what ever reason -- and dump them in the sewer.

It didn't matter why they were returned. Some were out of date, some had been mis-ordered (by a drug store, say), some had been damaged in transit -- all irrelevant. If, for any reason, these drugs weren't used exactly as originally intended, during which time they had passed outside of the company's control, they had to be destroyed.

I assume there were liability lawyers who had something to do with this. Have our shipping/tracking/inventory control systems progressed to such an extent over the past 30 years that we no longer need to worry about controlling drugs during transit -- even to the extent of being actually dispensed? We're wiling to send those back out to some poor schlub to use again? Madness!