Earlier this month a physician legislator in Missouri blocked a bill setting up a prescription drug monitoring program, making MO one of two remaining states without a PDMP.
Oh, and the Show-Me state’s death rate from drug overdose (most of which is from prescription drug abuse) is higher than the national average…
For the uninitiated, PDMPs help ensure patient safety by identifying potentially harmful drug-drug interactions; enable prescribers and dispensers to see if a patient is filling the same scrip multiple times, and inform doctors and pharmacists when a patient is getting multiple scripts from multiple docs. And they comply with all patient confidentiality requirements.
Republican Sen. Rob Schaaf, henceforth known as Missouri’s resident idiot, spent eight hours filibustering the PDMP bill, ending with this brilliant justification for not protecting patients with a PDMP: “If they overdose and kill themselves, it just removes them from the gene pool.”
And if Schaff prescribes percoset and some other doc is prescribing oxycontin and a third is prescribing a sedative and the patient dies thru no fault of their own, and their kids lose a mom, and a Scout troop loses a den mother and a school loses a teacher, all because Schaaf is an idiot, whose fault is it?
What does this mean for you?
We get the government we deserve, and we deserve it good and hard (apologies to HK Mencken)
May
16
He also justified it as an intrusion on patient privacy. Yet in Missouri I have to show my drivers licence and get entered into a database to buy allergy medicine with decongestent in it.
Apparently big pharma has better lobbists than the meth labs.
What is with the GOP that they make such sweeping generalizations about who uses drugs? Can this Senator really consider himself a public servant when he says things like that? What about all those addicts being created in WC? Do they deserve to die too because they were injured at work?