Healthcare/Pharmaceutical observation/rant

[Camelot Farms]

Last night DH took a full on frontal attack by a Wild Rose vine.

resulting in a mega gouge to his cornea.
So after 5 hours of pain (whole other rant...lol) he decided at 11pm that we needed to go to the ER. In his defense, he must have been in agony because he NEVER goes to the ER.

As the attending Doc was doing his thing which involved an eye stain, eye wash, dilation drops, antibiotic gel and painrelief drops, I noticed that each and every medication came from a new package.
Which of course makes sense. The insane part was the size of the packaging.

5 squirts (about 1 oz) out of the 8 oz eye wash bottle
2 drops of eye stain out of a 2 oz bottle
3 drops of numbing stuff out of a 2 oz bottle
etc etc etc

What a GIANT rip off on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies.
Why don't hospitals/health care advocates DEMAND proportionate products?

BlueCross paid for 8oz of eye wash and I am sure that they paid a small fortune for that 8oz.
Only used 1oz. The rest is in an incinerator somewhere.
8oz is ALOT of distilled water which by the way, you can buy by the gallon at the grocery market for 1.19
So why do we allow Pharms to oversize amounts and in the process overcharge the consumer.

Billions of dollars of unused medications must be thrown away annually in this country.

Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a polital health care observation/rant

 

[Whispering Winds]

Bet you its not in the trash, unless you saw it go there. The nurses divvy up a lot of stuff (not everyone does, don't get excited if you are a nurse and think I am "pointing fingers"), but my son works in a nursing home as an LPN and he said when a patient dies, their meds are divided among the nurses if they can use them. I know those little bitty bottles of cough medicine they use one spoon out of is put in a tub at one local hospital and its fair game to who wants them. We feel the same way about the cost too, took DS to the ER because of strep throat (said LATE Friday night, "my throat hurts" and by Sat. eve. I knew we were into full blown strep, so knew I couldn't wait until Monday AM and the bill was just over $800 for an hour and a half. Ridiculous.

 

[Dunkopf]

The insurance companies are on to it and pay a lot less than what the hospital bills for. The hospital agrees to a certain amount in order to be a part of the insurance program. They only charge the full rip off prices to people that have no insurance. Then they give you a 20% break to make you feel like you got a deal. The hospital writes of the extra charges that they agreed to not get paid for and claim them as a loss for tax purposes.

Whenever I go to the doctor or the ER I always request the left over stuff because it does go in the trash. Sometimes they actually need 8 ozs of the irrigation fluid or saline or whatever it is. I don't believe the left over stuff is put aside for anyone on staff to use as desired. It may happen but it certainly isn't legal and is a matter of bad staff management.