Count your meds. Some pharmacy weirdness.

Just that. I got a script that should have been for 90 tabs in mid august. Ran out the middle of last week. Went back to the pharmacy and they started to give me the run around about insurance not allowing a refill. Then it was they could not refill with out my doctors approval. So I said I can call him right now if you want. They then changed there tune and started talking in circles but saying nothing.  I flat out was pissed as I paid for them as it was not covered by my insurance and I had called my doctor to renew when I was running out last week and it should have been all set. The Jr pharmacist got real quiet when I told her that I paid for 90 and it looks like you only gave me 30. I then asked her if they were charging insurance for 90 but only dispensing 30?  Or is it actually covered by insurance but they are charging me anyway and only giving me 30?  She got really really quiet and told me to hang on. About 1 minute later (no joke it was less than a minute while a normal script takes 20 min for them to fill) the Sr pharmacist came back and handed me a brand new script for 90 more tabs and apologized about 100 times. I asked how much I owed them and I was told it was no charge.  (The cost is normally about $400). 
 

Did I just catch them in a scam?  

You definitely caught someone being fishy.  I wonder who you'd report that to?  FDA?  ATF?

Almost guaranteed they were/are committing insurance fraud. With the money involved in medications and narcotics, from doctors pushing opioids, political lobbyists, price gouging, and any number of bs schemes lining pockets from the bottom to the top, the folks at that pharmacy are just trying to play the game. 
 

It's taking everything I have not to rant against the American insurance industry and the inflated costs they create in order to say "see how much we saved you!" Few things get me as fired up. 

Or, someone just made a mistake and felt very embarrassed about it. It is, after all, someone's medications( not their fries). But people make mistakes, despite their best intentions. 

If I wanted to scam my customers, I certainly wouldn't have done it in such an obvious way. There was, after all, very little chance that you would have missed this. 

Sadly, now that insurance knows my health and what meds I need more than the doctor that actually sees me, I've noticed a lot of pharmacies are making a LOT more mistakes. Sometimes it becomes about more than best intentions. Scam, no. Problems recovering from  the nightmare forced on us a few years back... YES.

I would like to think it was a mistake but they never said it was a mistake and just apologize and move on. I could live with that and believe it as we are all human. Stuff happens. But the way they handlers it was like I caught them at something. It felt slimy.

At this point I am just going to chalk it up to WTF and move on. 

Oh and this time I counted the meds when I got home.  The count was off by two tabs in my favor. 

I have seen people spill the pills onto the counter in front of the cashier and count them right there.   Not a bad idea really. 

I know in the old days before ATM's I always counted my money twice.  Once when the teller counted it in front of me and once in front of the teller after it was handed to me.

My first thought is they had a bad employee that they already got rid of but now they are having to face the problems that employee caused.

As much as I would love to think that Hanlon's Razor applies here --never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity--the reaction and response do seem to point towards something more nefarious.

If it's a big name pharmacy inventory should be tracked electronically.  They may have been able to just look at the expected inventory count on the computer compared it to what's onhand.  They may have just short-filled the bottle accidently and noticed when their physical count was off. 

People go to jail for fraudulent billing and companies are often fined big $$$.  Whistleblowers get to keep a % of the penalty.  If someone were actively scamming the systm there'd ba lot of risk in that.  If it were a narcotic, I'd be much more concerned they were short-filling and diverting the extra pills to black market. 

If the script was paid for via medicare/ medicaid, you'd liklely report the issue to them.  I'm pretty sure pharmacies are regulated by a state agency .  Florida has a Board of Pharmacy Licensing. 

The meds are for gout so there is really no "market" for them unless there is and I don't know about it.  Yes it is a big chain.  The meds were not covered by my insurance due to them not being a generic and the one I get there was a recent patent re do or something that caused the price to go from about $7.00 for a 90 count to just shy of $400 for a 90 count.  Something about re licensing or re certifying it or something like that.  All BS to me but what do i know other than it costs me $$$.   So in either case I have to pay cash for them.  It does go against my deductible so not a complete loss but even if I meet my deductible I will still have to pay cash for this script.  

I bet it's more like 99.9% of the time they fill that med it is a 30 pill bottle. So when they filled yours they overlooked that. I bet when you pressed they saw in the system the original was actually a 90 pill bottle and knowing they almost never fill 90 of that med, they knew they goofed. 

They could likely still be in big trouble for not correctly filling a prescription, hence the response. 

Stampie (FS) said:

My first thought is they had a bad employee that they already got rid of but now they are having to face the problems that employee caused.

Yup. This sounds like it. 

Cholcrys?  That's expensive crap. 

Retired pharmacist here. Worked for one of the big chains.  This type of error isn't terribly rare.  When the techs are filling the prescription, they are looking at the label that goes on the bottle you get.  The label has "quantity 90" and "30 day supply".  Occasionally the tech sees the 30 and ignores the 90.  Dumb mistake that happens too often but understandable if you're aware of how understaffed the big chain pharmacies are. If for a non-controlled substance, we always took the customer's word for the shortage.  If a controlled substance, we double checked inventory.

In reply to dean1484 :

Good guess Fueled by Caffeine.  Colchicine  went from being a really,rallly cheap generic drug to being an outrageously priced branded drug due to PHARMA greed.

In reply to dean1484 :

If your gout med costs that much, you might consider allopurinol to help prevent flairs.  When I retired from retail it was still an inexpensive generic.  What works for a lot of people is allopurinol daily to keep uric acid low, then colchicine if needed for flare ups.  I've also seen indomethacin used successfully for flair ups.  Indomethacin is probably the most "dangerous" of the 3 drugs I've mentioned.

In reply to dean1484 :

Maybe she made a mistake? Rumor has it people do that sometimes.  I might have made one or two in my life. 
 

You know what happens when people who make a mistake are confronted? Sometimes they become defensive.  
Who knows she may have gotten a bad nights sleep or a distracting phone call?  Maybe he kid is sick and she's worried about him?  

What I've found works well in these situations is ask the person to help resolve the problem. " How can we fix this?" 

frenchyd said:

In reply to dean1484 :

Maybe she made a mistake? Rumor has it people do that sometimes.  I might have made one or two in my life. 
 

My pharmacy has screwed up a few times... it's a small pharmacy. I've also messed up and misplaced a bag and gone back to have them tell me they were confident it was properly filled. People mess up, doesn't mean they shouldn't have a look over their standard operating procedures. But I wouldn't jump to " I am getting scammed." 

My meds are all free thanks to my insurance ... well, free to me but not without cost. But I recently had the inverse of the OP's dilemma. I received three months worth of a certain med when it should have been one month's worth. When I finally realized the error a couple weeks later, I attributed it to incompetence on the part of the tech that fulfilled the prescription. The pharmacies are having trouble hiring competent techs.

M2Pilot said:

In reply to dean1484 :

If your gout med costs that much, you might consider allopurinol to help prevent flairs.  When I retired from retail it was still an inexpensive generic.  What works for a lot of people is allopurinol daily to keep uric acid low, then colchicine if needed for flare ups.  I've also seen indomethacin used successfully for flair ups.  Indomethacin is probably the most "dangerous" of the 3 drugs I've mentioned.

 

Tried Allopurinol and I get bad side effects from it.  It makes me feel weird like I have had a couple glasses of wine and not in a good way.  Colchicine is the ticket for me.  It was dirt cheep for the longest time but the prices jumped about 2 years ago as I noted before. 

frenchyd said:

In reply to dean1484 :

What I've found works well in these situations is ask the person to help resolve the problem. " How can we fix this?" 

The person I was talking to was a different person than the one that filled it a month ago.  I completely agree that is the way to handle it and that is where I started but they went strait to I was wrong and started making excuses and blaming everyone else (insurance and my doctor) and talking in circles.  If you do that to me I load up the big guns take aim and then ask very nicely one more time.