A patient came in this month with insulin-dependent diabetes. Her Endocrinologist had placed her on a combination of a long-acting insulin (Lantus) and short-acting insulin (Humalog). She stated her situation bluntly: “I can’t afford it. It’s $300 a month!”Her insurance seemed like a reasonable plan. I looked on GoodRx to check out the cash price. Each…
We’re getting older and we’re on a couple of medications. Our health plan is the same but they switched pharmacy plans to Ingenio. Automated refills stopped. Payment preferences vanished. You have to go online and reset your preferences. Dang! What were those passwords, again? I realized I needed to make a refill request and sent…
Get our awesome newsletter by signing up here. We don’t give your email out and we won’t spam you Tweet
The whole Coronavirus outbreak is getting a little worrisome. No one knows where this is going and writing an article on this site will likely be outdated before it is even posted. Testing can only be done at the CDC. That creates a huge delay in getting information. We don’t know how contagious this will…
It is my opinion that no computer system can survive an attack by a skilled and well-financed group of hackers. Most Electronic Medical Records vendors will make it sound like they are virtually invincible. I don’t believe it. When I heard about Iran’s program to attack computers, I worried. Get our awesome newsletter by signing…
The attached two faxes are part of a real pharmacy scam. The patient and doctor identifiers have been blocked out. The name of the pharmacy is left intact. Here is how the scam works. The pharmacy uses readily available databases to identify patients with diabetes. They claim they call the patient or get them to…
It’s the New Year’s and drug companies immediately went to work raising prices. The quote I love is from the Arstechnica article: In a statement to Reuters, Sanofi noted that its increases were in line with the company’s commitment to keep the rate of increases below “medical inflation.” Medical inflation? Obviously that’s a special kind…
About this time, our office is packed with various wonderful goodies. Between every patient, we pause to stuff our face with something amazing. By the end of the day, our stomachs are dragging on the ground. When mid-January arrives, however, the food is gone. There are no snacks to be found. If you’re lucky, you…
In our area, if you send a patient for a specialty evaluation, this is often what you get….In case you don’t understand the reference, check out these YouTube ads: https://youtu.be/eHCTaUFXpP8 https://youtu.be/8dOHEw8izno (Check them out, anyway! They’re hilarious!) Tweet
Overpriced back braces and knee braces. $800 arthritis creams which are no better than placebo. Marginal Quality Medicare Advantage HMO’s with tiny doctor networks.Poor quality diabetic testing supplies.Expensive Diabetic Shoes. Junk mail. Phone calls. Emails. Text messages. Even door-to-door salespeople! Once you hit Medicare, you become a target for marketing.Much of this nonsense eventually comes…