Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Sensible Medicine

The Florida legislature recently passed a law that makes sense. It will allow people to refill prescriptions in an emergency, even if their insurer says they're not yet due for a refill:

Recently, the Legislature passed the Emergency Prescription Refill bill (Florida Statute 252.358 and 462.0275). This law requires all insurers and managed-care organizations to suspend refill-too-soon restrictions when a patient seeks a refill in a county that:
  • Is currently under a hurricane warning issued by the National Weather Service
  • Is declared to be under a state of emergency in an executive order issued by the governor
  • Has activated its emergency operations center and its emergency management plan
This law also allows patients outside of these areas to get an emergency 72-hour refill if the pharmacist is unable to readily obtain refill authorization from the doctor.
In certain cases, simply telling people to "be prepared" is not enough. Sometimes you've got to remove obstacles for them. This law is a good example of that.


1 comment:

Vicky Davidson said...

I agree that this is very sensible legislation. Is anyone aware of similar legislation in other states? I live in MO and we don't really have a lot of advance notice that some of our emergencies are Imminent, so the language used in Florida would not be useful to us in all cases.

There are a number of people who have been iced in their homes or isolated because of flooding, who have run out of medications because they do not have the emergency supply on-hand because of the refill-too-soon restrictions. Any direction to existing laws would be very much appreciated.