I can’t believe you’re obtuse to nuance. I’m not defending corporations, I’m defending healthcare and trying to make sure ire is directed at the right people. Ire is not a binary, there are layers, and pharmacies are the least ire worthy of all of these.

Yeah, and you’re missing what I said. What I was saying is the pharmacies might have some responsibility, but there was potential for them to do wrong by accidentally misreporting doctors, therefore doing the right thing might’ve been erring on the side of underreporting. Nobody’s perfect, therefore many medical professionals and facilities choose to lean into one side of the error spectrum to reduce harm. The right thing very well might’ve been to underreport, because, as I said in my previous comment, underreporting might’ve been weighed to cause less harm than risking misreporting doctors.

I think what they’re saying is the doctors and Perdue have far more culpability than the pharmacies did for not reporting overprescriptions.

Seriously, think about it. There are many controlled medications that if a patient just weren’t able to get them would really fuck them up. Opioids are one of them. We act like once someone’s addicted we should just stop filling the script, but that’s not how addiction works. That philosophy is literally what’s made the opioid epidemic stick around. States with more restrictive opioid laws have higher rates of addiction because people have to go to the streets to get opiates for legitimate medical use, but then get addicted because they have unlimited access.

Plus, that’s part of the problem, it’s not exactly easy to tell when a doctor is acting in good faith or not, on the pharmacies’ end. Prescription limits are kinda bullshit, because what if you are a GP and you just happen to get a bunch of patients with broken limbs. Like I literally know people who broke their arm who only got NSAIDs and maybe tramadol because of these arbitrary limits and doctors now being afraid of being reported for overprescribing. Or, take my medication. I don’t take opiates, but I do take ADHD meds. Sometimes I have problems getting it filled at my preferred pharmacy, like I did this month. I literally have periods where my amphetamine prescription is being called in to four pharmacies, and from their perspective it looks like I might get it filled at all four pharmacies. In reality, my doctor is just moving my script so I can get it filled and I only ever pick up one of those a month.

So it’s not really a clear cut thing, and sure, maybe CVS underreported, but there’s far more risk to the patients by pharmacies misreporting than underreporting due to patients potentially losing medication they may need. In no world can the pharmacies that have little say in the decisions have as much culpability as the people actually making those decisions.