This am’s WorkCompCentral reported that Florida Gov. Rick Scott spoke out in favor of a ban on physician dispensing of Scheduled drugs – those medications regulated/tracked by the DEA.
It’s indeed encouraging that Scott has finally decided to do something positive about the pill mills that write scripts for more oxycontin than all other states combined. But the Gov, citing what can only be called specious arguments, still opposes a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program.
According to Jim Saunder’s piece in HealthNews Florida, “Scott also at least partially endorsed a House proposal to prevent doctors from dispensing drugs in their offices. Scott, however, added a caveat that such a ban should include “appropriate” exceptions — and didn’t elaborate about what those exceptions might be.”
Moreover, Scott’s new position does nothing to address the $34 million problem.
That’s how much more Florida’s employers are paying for drugs dispensed by docs for workers comp patients than they would if the drugs were dispensed by retail pharmacies.
Here’s how WCRI described the issue:
“Cambridge, MA-based WCRI found that the average payment per claim for prescription drugs in Florida’s workers’ compensation system was $565–38 percent higher than the median of the study states.
The main reason for the higher prescription costs in Florida was that some physicians wrote prescriptions and dispensed the prescribed medications directly to their patients. When physicians dispensed prescription drugs, they often were paid much more than pharmacies for the same prescription.
The WCRI study, Prescription Benchmarks for Florida, found that some Florida physicians wrote prescriptions more often for certain drugs that were especially profitable. For example, Carisoprodol (Soma®, a muscle relaxant) was prescribed for 11 percent of the Florida injured workers with prescriptions, compared to 2 to 4 percent in most other study states.
Financial incentives may help explain more frequent prescription of the drug, as the study suggested. The price per pill paid to Florida physician dispensers for Carisoprodol was 4 times higher than if the same prescription was filled at pharmacies in the state.
The study reported that the average number of prescriptions per claim in Florida was 17 percent higher than in the median state. Similar results can be seen in the average number of pills per claim.”
To say Scott’s position is inconsistent is like saying abuse of prescription drugs is bothersome; a wild understatement.
Mar
30
