So, here we are again.

Where as the mighty angry one been all these years?  I’ll be honest.  Life.  Thats right, fucking life.  Happens to the best of us boys and girls.  Get married, have kids, and suddenly you’re on statins, getting a colonoscopy, watching your pharmacy infamy die a horrible rotting death, and watching ‘my 600 lb life’ hating that fucking doctor’s gold stethoscope.

Well, that and I just didnt give a fuck anymore about the daily crackhead grind and idiot patients.  I had reached pharmacy-zen where every problem was no big deal.  I expected the early refill bitching and the stupid lost script song and dance.  I expected idiots to not understand they had a deductible first of the year (like the previous 5+ years that they magically ‘forgot’ about).  It’s hard to rant about shit when you expect it coming in the door for 10+ hours a day.

Plus the server the site was on was held together by duct-tape and bailing wire.  I was afraid to post for fear of the entire deck of cards falling down.   No really, it was a strong Go-Lytely fart away from exploding.

Not to mention (I absolutely hate this fucking part) that I had to watch what I post and couldn’t be as raw as I had in the past.  Yeah, censoring yourself sucks.  However since our president is 1000x worse than I am, fuck it trebek!

In other words I’m as full of excuses as your typical crackhead…. Only i’m not hounding you on the phone…. or staring at your face… or wishing you dead… or wanting a gallon of prometh with codeine for my ‘bronchitis’…  Ya’ll got the yellow norcos? I’ll pay cash!

HOWEVER!  That being said, after hearing the calls of help from you all, I dumped money into a server, got my shit together, got a new shitty site layout that will not be 100 years out of date, and decided to MAKE PHARMACY GREAT AGAIN (Okay, so maybe I wont make it ‘great’, I’ll just make it suck a whole lot less)!  Like motherfucking Batman coming out of retirement (actually I think im more of a Deadpool’ish sorta crazy).

Motherfucking #tapreturns (for the record, I fucking HATE hashtags.  Like really hate them.  Twitter ruined the internet.

Enough about my excuses! Here are some tidbits that are in the pipe for ranting:

• eScripts and how much they make my life hell (complete with image examples of some whacky ones if I can figure out how to strip all the metadata out so people dont get in trouble with the HIPAA police)
• Docs who take altered C2 Rx’s and say “Oh just fill it anyway”.  Yeah, what the fuck.
• All the bullshit the DEA makes us do now for stupid Opoids + Soma + Benzos.  As if I did enough babysitting.
• Just general fucking bitching about DIR fees and other insurance bullshit.

This is taken from Apothecary Tales.  Its too well written and too funny to have me just skip over it:

Here is my outline as to what could be the perfect socalized will-fail-less government subsidized medicine plan.  Since obviously this is going to be passed riding on the coattails of the H1N1 fear and panic machine, I could at least throw in my $0.02 as to how this is to be laid out.

Now before you read this, remember years past when WalMart came into town?  How they used their huge might to pretty much crush any competition in the area with “low low prices” all while shitting on their employees and being an all-around shitty store with poor service.  Now considering this government plan has the financial backing of every taxpaying man and woman in the nation (regardless if they want to or not); think of Walmart as your cushy retirement insurance plan goes bankrupt and you’re forced to enroll into a government ran plan.

The Angry Pharmacist Socialized Health Plan Solution

By: The Angry Pharmacist

http://www.theangrypharmacist.com

Here are some nice and easy (and unrealistic) points that this new government funded (with freshly printed money/stolen from the working class) health plan should have:

• No trade name drugs are covered.  No exceptions.  Prilosec/Protonix doesn’t work for you? Tough shit.  Cough with ARB? Too bad.  None of the trade name medications would be covered.  The government needs to eat its own dogfood (or practice what it preaches) and only does business with companies that drive down the cost of medication (ie: generic companies).  That expensive chemo drug not covered? Then let the government use taxpayer dollars to buy out Amgen so they can give it out for free (why not, everyone else got bailed out).
• The plan is voluntary.  If you wish to be a part of Obamacare, then you get the premiums deducted out of your gross-pay.  If you wish to have private health care, then you won’t be dinged a dime for Obamacare.  I’m not paying for all of your PacifiCare and Blue Cross plans (and your insurance premium dollars dont pay for my private insurance) so why should I have to pay for someones Obamacare?  The chances of this happening are as likely as you buying the nice bridge I have for sale.
• You get 4 doctors visits a year with no/low copay (say, $10).  Every doctors visit after that has a $25-50 copay.  Yeah, it sucks for the people with chronic conditions like diabetes and stuff, but its better than nothing.  Don’t get the unlimited text messaging plan and you can afford your doctors visits.  Don’t order a large pizza and you can afford another doctors visit.  Wait, actually becoming an active part in my health? What is this witchcraft you speak of!
• You get 1 $0 copay ER room a year.  Every ER visit after that is $100 minimum.  I’d like to see this figure raised to $250 or higher since ER is for……. EMERGENCIES!  You know why the ER rooms are so packed? People view them as “Free”.
• Since all Rx’s will be billed to the government, if you are on a maintenance medication and you are non-compliant, guess what, your premiums just went up unless YOU (not your doctor, not your pharmacy) can submit documentation showing that you were taken off of that drug, or switched to another one due to intolerance.  Whats the point of the government dumping all this cash into your doctors visits and medications if YOU are TOO LAZY to do anything about YOUR CONDITION.  Not taking your medication is just pissing away money.  No matter how many times I bitch, your doctor bitches if you don’t want to take your medicine then you can get dinged in the pocketbook.  True this can be thwarted by people just picking up their regular drugs and not taking them, but it might make a few people think twice before asking for medication they have no intention of taking.  Cue the “Waah, we don’t want the government poking its nose into our lives” as they happily promote Obamacare.  Wait, are you confused?
• If your doctor kept up to the standard of care, then unless his peers can show an act of negligence, you cannot sue him/her for 1.4 zillion dollars in a huge malpractice suit.  Lets face it, without your doctors care, you would have died a long time ago.  We don’t need your doctor running up the bill with 400 lab tests every damn office visit out of fear of getting sued if he/she happened to miss something weird.

Now on the surface, this plan looks pretty damn shitty.  However we have a fundamental problem in this country where we want privatized health-care at socialized prices (ie: Free).  Not going to happen, actually it can’t happen!  Look at MediCare and how broke it’s becoming!  No seniors bitch about Medicare (doughnut hole), because they are so (doughnut hole) happy about the coverage (doughnut hole) that it provides (doughnut hole).  Did I mention that the government had to implement the doughnut hole to keep the Medicare system from going completely broke?  Did I also mention that we just slapped Rx drug benefits on top of an already stressed system like an idiot taking a 4th mortgage out on his house to buy a boat then wondering why he can’t make the payments.  Should I just ignore the point that before Medicare part D came out, seniors on MediCare were paying cash-money for ALL of their medications and were doing just fine on all generics?  It wasn’t until the government decided to “feel sorry for them” and slap on a part-D plan that they became greedy and wanted trade name shit (all for no copays).

If health plans were cars, this would be the basement model with no A/C, manual transmission, manual windows/door locks, and it pretty much just gets you where you need to go.  This would be the ideal solution.  It gives people the basic care they need, and to be honest if they wished for a plan with more bells and whistles then some most-costly private plans could do them well.

Oh, but wait, we all want our cake and eat it too.  Mark my words, this plan will give people an inch when they want a mile, and short of the entire collapse of the healthcare system, the public will just want MORE for LESS.

I’d like my bailout in 20’s please.

In this world, there are two types of social workers:

• The ones you never see or hear about.  The one that the patient calls and they get the shit done fast.  The only time you actually speak with them is a 5 second phone call with an ID/Group/etc number and a “did it work?”.  Pharmacists love these kind of social workers.
• The social workers that are not like the above group which I will elaborate below.

Every profession has its fair share of idiots.  There are idiot pharmacists, idiot doctors, idiot bus drivers and idiot ditch diggers.  The only exception to this rule is patients, which they are all idiots. 🙂

However social workers seem to collect and concentrate the “duh”.  The social workers that make their presence known to pharmacists turn out to be the most incompetent, inept, and whiny people on the planet.  They are like like Steve Urkel (“Diiiiiiid I do that?”) of the health care world, out to do good, but end up pissing people off/making it worse in the end.  A whining contest between a crackhead and a social worker? I’ll let you guess who wins. Here is a conversation I had recently with a wonderful social worker:

SocialWorker: “Hi! I’m Billy and I’m a social worker”

TheAngryPharmacist: “Hi billy”

SW: “I got a call from John Smith who said that his Zyvox was not covered and he would have to pay for it”

TAP: “Yeah, his insurance doesn’t cover Zyvox withou-”

SW: “BUT HE IS ILL AND HE NEEDS THAT MEDICATION!”

TAP: *sigh*

SW: “HOW CAN WE GET HIM THE MEDICATION!”

TAP: “Uh, its well over a thousand dollars”

SW: “THAT IS HORRIBLE! HE NEEDS IT!”

I’m going to save you the whining that followed, because to be honest my brain had switched off at that point.  It just involved complaining about the price of Zyvox, how evil MediCal was (oh really?) and that the doctor should just be able to write for something and have it covered.  The whole concept of having a medical resident just write for Zyvox without trying anything else (or doing a C/S workup) completely eluded him.  Oh, and somehow it was /my/ fault that I wouldn’t give him the medicine for free.  Yeah, COMPLETE knowledge of how the system works.

Here is another gem:

SW: “Hi! Im Jane, the social worker for Billy Mays”

TAP: “Hi Jane”

SW: “Billy’s MediCal isn’t working, and he’s out of medication, what can we do for him”

TAP: “Well, he’s should only be out of Prevacid, he can go a day or two without it”

SW: “Well, can you fill the Rx, then call MediCal and find out when his coverage will be turned back on and bill it then?”

TAP: “Uh, no.”

SW: “Why not! HE NEEDS THE MEDICATION! HE IS IN PAIN!”

TAP: *sigh*

These two were in the span of about a week of each other. They were different social workers but I assume must either share the same lead-coated coffee cup or used the same lead-painted crib growing up.

Whenever a Medicare/Medical patient comes in and say “I spoke with my social worker about my MediCare Part D coverage” I want to bang my face against the counter.  99% of these cases end up in the patient not having coverage for a month (while one gets shut off, and the other starts the first of the following month) and suddenly it becomes my problem.  For someone who supposedly knows how the ‘system’ works, they sure manage to screw things up.

Like I said earlier, there are social workers out there who are completely ninjas and are awesome at what they do, however they never TALK TO ME!  Share your funny social worker story!

Many of you have emailed me asking why I have been so quiet the past month or so.  Well, now you know.

Welcome to the new Angry Pharmacist site!  Not having threaded comments (meaning you can reply to a comment, and your reply appears under theirs) really bugged me, and Moveable Type just wasn’t cutting the mustard.

So I found n6design and asked them for a new layout for WordPress.  They went all over town taking pictures of old stock bottles and tablets (I love the Viagra rocket, but the Soma balloon is the best) and even managed to take some pictures of an old Bates Stamping Machine.

The site otherwise should be the same.  Most of the old direct links should work, however I know of a few that are probably broken.  I’ll be adding more things (like twitter, can’t let DrugMonkey and TAestP get one up on me) as soon as I get most of the bugs worked out.

See, not only does the pharmacy piss me off, but computers piss me off as well.

All I tried to do was to upgrade the software that this system runs on.  You know, new version of Movable Type, tons of new features, shiny-shiny-oo-oo!

Yeah, I got it in the ass, big time.

If you received like a bunch of email from this site about old-as-hell entries, thats why.  I’m sorry (and thats the only time you’ll get a genuine Sorry from me) that the software that I tried to upgrade sucks.  Fortunately I managed to contain the 45,000 emails that were on their way out.

I’m trying to get account creation fixed so you can log-in and post to this site (without going through the "I’m not a spambot" human test with the funny writing)

Stay tuned for some awesome Medicare Part-D handouts that I’m making especially for your problem old-patients!

If you see something that is really broken, email druglord@theangrypharmacist.com and I’ll do my best to see whats going on.

Once in a while I’ll do these retrospective posts after reading some of the old entries that I have made.  Think of it as a “Final Thoughts” like Jerry Springer does (only this is FAR from my final thought).  This isn’t a space filler so the site will have new content for you to read when I’m short on rants *ahem* but some deep thoughts from yours truly.

I have painted a colorful picture of Pharmacy.  I have exposed all of the crap, the drama, and the daily pain that pharmacy schools pretend don’t exist or your pharmacist cant talk about while in the store.  Despite how much of an asshole you think I am, or wonder how or why I’m even a pharmacist, you too have gotten a clear idea of what goes on behind that counter.  You have realized that we are more than just pill counters and the ignorant bitches of doctors.  Other pharmacists realize that they are not alone in the sea of stupidity with sparse slowly-sinking lifeboats littered about that we all tightly clench onto.

But what really makes doing this whole blogging thing worth while (along with keeping my sanity, god knows its not the ad revenue check – $1 menu here I come) is that some of you out there will look at your pharmacist with a new light.  I hope its a positive light (and not think that we’re all a bunch of raging assholes).  I hope you’ll be more understanding when things don’t go correctly or smoothly and once in a while give us a thanks (or a box of candy, we love candy.  Booze also works well too).

I’ve been reading the Raging Server (http://www.ragingserver.com), and doing so has given me a whole new respect to Waiters/Waitresses/Waitripeople.  They deal with the same shit that I deal with, so I tip better because of it.  I wish other people in other professions would write what their day is /really/ like so we can get an understanding of how their jobs are similar to ours and would give us just a tiny bit more restraint before we blow up at them for doing something that we don’t like.

Just a thought.  Fuck Perdue and Liberty Medical.

Alright.  I tried to lighten things up a bit by posting a funny entry that I did over a year ago but never made public.  Unfortunately I got the YEAR wrong when I set the date upon which to publish it.  Its visible, just back with entries dated around the end of 1/2007.  Go team me.

Those who are signed up for email notifications already know about it, but for the rest of you I’ll just link the post here (to keep from breaking the links in the notification emails).

One of the problems with writing entries that piss off a big portion of the online community is that you draw a ton of people to your site.  That little diabetic stint along with pissing off most of the chain pharmacists pushed my web hosting bill through the roof.  Yeah, I’m a pharmacist.  Yeah, I make “a lot” of money.  However when a website starts to chip more and more away at your income, you need to stem the bleeding eventually.

I mean I love the attention and all and its sorta neat to be such a famous-yet-totally-unknown pharmacist, however love doesn’t pay the bills.  So, to keep me ranting and out of the poor house, I put google ads on the sidebar over there ——->  They are stupid, text only, and actually have things to do with pharmacy (go figure).  Click on them if you’re interested, if not then just ignore them.

I don’t rant because I want the ad money, I dont rant for the attention or the notoriety, I rant because it keeps me sane, and it shows other pharmacists (and students) out there that you’re not alone in dealing with the cesspool of stupidity known as the ‘general public’.

So I hope you don’t view this as me selling-out or cashing in.  I’m just trying to keep my head above water for something that I love doing and preventing me from becoming a raging alcoholic puppy-kicker.

Oh, and I don’t really have any control over the ads they show, so if you see any for online pharmacies or mail order places, remember that they are paying for ads while I am receiving money for ads.  I still hate online and mail-order places.