Vets not getting VA medicine in AK. Is this an area where Sen. Kerry can help?

[beachmom]

http://www.adn.com/life/health/story/998763.html

Veterans caught in dispute over medicines

By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
[e-mail]

Published: November 3rd, 2009 10:26 PM
Last Modified: November 4th, 2009 10:02 PM

Military veterans living in the state-run Alaska Pioneer Homes are losing out on free or low-cost prescription benefits they are entitled to for serving their country because two medical bureaucracies can't seem to figure out how to get VA drugs to them.

The problem -- mostly about the packaging the medicines come in -- affects those veterans who need help from staff to take their meds.

All they want is for the pills to be in a "blister pack" instead of a bottle. But the VA says they can't do that, so these vets have to pay hundreds of dollars for what should be $8.

The state of Alaska (thankfully no longer having the dingbat as their governor) might be able to help, but it seems like the VA should:

One possible solution the legislators and Pioneer Homes came up with last week, said Cote, is for the state to contract with a provider to prescribe the medicines the dozen or so veterans who used VA prescriptions in Anchorage need; the state, in consideration of these veterans being unable to use their VA benefits, would then pick up the cost of the medicines. Cote is going to investigate this idea.

Combs doesn't see why it's such a difficult problem to solve.

The pills go from one pharmacy, unopened, to another pharmacy, she said. "To me, the liability doesn't make sense," she said. "Is there something else going on that I don't know?"

The two bureaucracies -- the VA and the Pioneer Homes -- both say they want to resolve the issue somehow.

Anyone think this is an issue John Kerry should get involved with? Is this a nationwide problem?

[karynnj]

1. Though he is not on the committee with juristition, I would guess that he could

make a statement, but it would seem that this is something where pushing the VA, now headed by Shinsheki, would be able to help.

This seems to be 2 bureaucracies being inflexible. Cote's solution, though it helps the vets, seems really dumb. Simpler solutions are to drop the blister pack requirement or if that serves some purpose, couldn't Alaska get bids for a small business - or the government - to receive bottles of medicine, repackage them in blister packs and send them on? I agree with Combs that I really don't see what the reason for the problem is.

[beachmom]

2. Oh, you need to read the whole article. The blister packs are safer

than bottles, where they were apparently just putting the pills in medi-packs, for which it was hard to tell which pill was which when administering them. They also could not allow nursing assistants do it; only nurses could.

[karynnj]

3. I can see the packs are safer, but it still seems that

either the VA or Alaska could set up a business that creates blister packs from bottles. The cost per 3 months supply of drugs of putting them into blister packs would seem to be less than the difference between the VA and the non VA price. (I assume the machines used by nearly every OTC drug producer can be purchased.)

I do agree that the blister packs are safer than the medi-packs.