Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Mail-order pharmacy is a bitter pill for your druggist

By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published October 7, 2006

I don't mean to sound insanely nostalgic or impossibly old, but in the town where I grew up, the pharmacy was a sort of personal place. The same pharmacist ran it for years, everybody knew him and he knew us.

Come to think of it, we have that kind of place a few blocks from where I live right here in Tampa. The pharmacy on West Shore Boulevard is so anachronistic that when we moved to this side of town I was almost afraid to go in. How could such a thing still exist?

Yet, it does. Any number of times I have heard the pharmacist and others who work there call their customers by name. Someone clips coupons and tapes them onto bottles of shampoo and deodorant, so if you're too lazy to cut them out of the paper yourself, you still get the discount. If you ask for something they don't have, they'll special order it for you - even if it's a hard-to-find skin cream I'd heard about from a friend that cost only $7.

My husband and I would get all our drugs there, but we are one of those lucky families who have health insurance, and part of that insurance is a mail-away prescription drug plan that sells three-month supplies of drugs at a big discount. I'm not crazy about getting my prescriptions filled by a pharmacist I've never seen, and in the summer it makes me anxious when my drugs sit in 100-degree metal mailboxes. I don't like having to calculate when to order refills in advance since it will take at least a week to get them in the mail.

And it galls me to give my money to a company whose CEO was compensated last year to the tune of $7.8-million, according to aflcio.org.

But I can't afford not to.

When a long-term drug is cheaper or the same price - and this happens - we go to the neighborhood pharmacy.

Now the mail-away drug company really hates that!

And they let us know it.

We buy a particular drug my husband takes every day at the neighborhood drug store, and as soon as Drugs R Us hears about it, we hear from them.

They call us. They leave messages on our voice mail. They send letters.

It's always the same letter informing us that we can use a convenient money-saving mail-away program and also order refills online, by phone or fax. They enclose a sheet of easy-to-read instructions with simple illustrations.

We know all that, okay! And they should know we know, given the number of times we have done it.

But they are just rabid to have you buy drugs their way.

So it's curious that when you call, you immediately get an electronic voice admonishing you, "If you are calling for any reason other than prescription services," hang up and call another number.

Why else would I be calling 1-800-REFILL?

Then after a long pause, so long you think it will be the electronic girl who hangs up, you're greeted by an electronic chatty Cathy.

"Tell me your prescription number," she says. "For example, 012345678900." She carefully repeats 12 digits.

Prescription number? Gotcha. That's why we called.

This week when I called, I got the dreaded, "Please hold." After several repeats of "Please continue to hold," I hung up and called back.

A male electronic voice - why is it always a male voice that delivers the bad news? - informed me: "Our systems are currently updating so that we cannot refill your request at this time."

It was 10:30 on a weekday morning. Even the guys "updating" I-275 have the brains to work at night.

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sthompson125@tampabay.rr.com.

[Last modified October 7, 2006, 06:26:57]