New York City to Restrict Prescription Painkillers in Public Hospitals’ Emergency Roo
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: January 10, 2013
Some of the most common and most powerful prescription painkillers on the market will be restricted sharply in the emergency rooms at New York City’s 11 public hospitals, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday in an effort to crack down on what he called a citywide and national epidemic of prescription drug abuse.
Under the new city policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days’ worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all. And lost, stolen or destroyed prescriptions will not be refilled.
City officials said the policy was aimed at reducing the growing dependency on painkillers and preventing excess amounts of drugs from being taken out of medicine chests and sold on the street or abused by teenagers and others who want to get high.
“Abuse of prescription painkillers in our city has increased alarmingly,” Mr. Bloomberg said in announcing the new policy at Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital in Queens. Over 250,000 New Yorkers over age 12 are abusing prescription painkillers, he said, leading to rising hospital admissions for overdoses and deaths, Medicare fraud by doctors who write false prescriptions and violent crime like “holdups at neighborhood pharmacies.”
Read More>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/ny...s.html?hp&_r=0
A mayor telling hospitals what medicines to prescribe? I don't know, maybe they do over prescribe but when did Bloomburg go to Medical school? I thought he was a dietician and gun crime specialist?
New York City to Restrict Prescription Painkillers in Public Hospitals’ Emergency Roo
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rockntractor
Bloomberg is starting to think he is a dictator like Obama or something, the two of them will bump heads yet.
Nah. Doomberg is setting NYC as a model for Obama to use to mold the rest of the country into.
New York is the beta testing program for Obamas "America 2.0"
And when 44 launches it on us he'll hold up what Doomberg has done as a "shining example of what I want all of America to be".
Sent from my BlackBerry 9800 using Tapatalk
Bloomberg Slaps Down Criticism of Painkiller Restriction Plan
Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city officials unveiled a new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms as a way to combat what they described as a growing addiction problem in the region. Some critics, as documented by The New York Times, however, felt the move would unnecessarily hurt poor and uninsured patients who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor. Needless to say, Mr. Bloomberg was not swayed by this line of argument.
“The city hospitals we control, so…we’re going to do it and we’re urging all of the other hospitals to do it, voluntary guidelines. Somebody said, oh, somebody wrote, ‘Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor,’” the mayor said on his weekly radio show with John Gambling. “Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect….There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”
In the same interview, Mr. Bloomberg stressed the initiative’s simple rationale is to prevent extra pills from piling up in the cabinets of New Yorkers who no longer need them, where they can pose a health risk if they’re abused.
Read More>http://politicker.com/2013/01/bloomb...triction-plan/
