Being the recipient of several major surgeries over the past few years, this gives me great personal concern.
Hopefully, it will be folks like you that find a safe way to make this public and get it turned around.
I went in for heart surgery. I suffered a stroke during surgery and contracted MRSA. Instead of a 6-8 day stay, I was in the hospital for two very long and extremely painful months.
Had it not been for morphine and oxy’s, I doubt that I would have made it. As it was, there were times I had thoughts of wanting to die rather than deal with the insane pain.
People will not just suffer from more pain, it may cause some of them not to fight for life.
Thank you for what you do...
This has apparently being going on for a while.
http://news.nurse.com/article/20111204/NATIONAL02/112120014/-1/frontpage
Basically it said “please conserve midazolam, fentanyl, morphine, and hydromorphone.....supplies are CRITICALLY short & the hospital is struggling to maintain supplies”.
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Simple
This means the hospital has squandered the budget with lavish dinners and expensive trips for the top administrators, and has no money left for basic needs like midazolam, fentanyl, morphine, and hydromorphone.
“...supplies are CRITICALLY short & the hospital is struggling to maintain supplies”.
should read....
“BUDGET MONEY is CRITICALLY short & the hospital is struggling to maintain supplies”.
My guess is these are all drugs which are off patents and the newest drug is 100 times as expensive but only mildly more effective.
On The Road to Socialist Utopia (starring Bobama Hope and Bing-a-ling Biden), one crisis after another has to occur so the masses will beg the government to save them.
If no crisis is on the horizon, manufacture one.
Leni
I’d say the government is stockpiling anticipating SHTF.
Let’s see....how do you drive up costs??? Hmm....creating a shortage is one way.
We were short of Sufenta today. One of our Neuro guys wanted to use it for a neuromonitored patient so as not to dampen the EEG trace during surgery but was told, “It’s too costly.”
When you start rationing and cost containment shortages happen.
It will only get worse...
I have lived in China, Eastern Europe and other countries.
It is the direct and unavoidable route of state-management and price controls. It is the same everywhere. The details are always different, but the result is always the same. What you will see (and what we are seeing) is attacks on the suppliers - they are profiteering, hoarding, etc.. etc..
I do believe that in another 10 years, we will see that there will develop a large black-market in medicine. You will need to bribe doctors to see them, as is normal practice in places like China and Russia.
Also, medical tourism will become a booming business - for those who can afford it.
My doctor told me a month or two ago that there was a huge scarcity of lidocaine and xylocaine too. He was forced to cut his dosages in half, then quarters as his stock shrunk, to be able to give his patients at least a tiny bit of relief.
“What the heck is happening to the drug supply in this country?”
One word: O-B-A-M-A
Regulations changed which made it more expensive and difficult to produce drugs. Then one main company had problems and shut down. Nobody elsr is producing the drugs
My spouse runs a children’s hospital. Drug companies can’t be profitable with the current Medicaid reimbursements so they have just stopped making some drugs. The more the government gets involved, the worse things become.
The hospital is constantly having to deal with critical drug shortages. A lot are drugs for pediatric cancer patients.
Cool,huh !
Oh, but not to worry, if Sasha, Miliah or Moochelle ever need drugs to save their sorry lives, I’m sure they will have no problem obtaining them.
Thank you for posting this. My husband is in the hospital with late stage cancer. Shortages of avastin, reglan and one night the nurse told me they had enough for 2 doses of phenergan for the whole hospital! She managed to get one of those for us. It is frightening now but really makes me wonder what the future for us baby boomers will be.
Those are all generic, right? Is there any chance that there just happen to be proprietary medications that can substitute for these at a large multiple of the price?
I have been having problem finding another generic medication for some time. There is no shortage of the raw materials for making it, there is a lot of demand, and it should be possible for the limited number of manufacturers to make a decent profit on it. The only explanations I have been able to come up with are:
1. Corruption: The makers of brand name products have been able to apply various types of political, regulatory, and business pressure to get the generic companies to limit or halt production.
2. A large portion of production is being diverted to illegal non-prescription use.
... warm-up for `The Hunger Games’?
My daughter is reading it & I like to know what she’s reading.
Just in time medicine. Having supplies sitting on a shelf is no longer considered economically justified under the obama way of life.
I don’t know but I did a search and came up with this page, there are a lot of shortages.
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/DrugShortages/ucm050792.htm