Prescription Refills on the Road

We, like most folks of a “certain age”, take prescription drugs. With the wide network of large pharmacies like Walgreens, Wal-Mart, and supermarket chains with pharmacies, getting refills while on the road has not been an issue. Wal-Mart’s chain of stores is available far and wide, so that is where we have been going for the past several years.

When a prescription has expired, our doctors in Nashville are happy to call in a new one (usually with 12 months of refills) to whichever Wal-Mart we are near. When we leave that state, we simply go to the nearest Wal-Mart in our new location when we need a refill. The pharmacy there transfers the prescription, with the remaining refills, to this new location and we have our medication in about 30 minutes. This system has worked beautifully for the past 5 years. Worked at least until we hit New York.

Two of our prescriptions needed to be refilled last week. As we’ve always done, we got our empty bottles and struck out for Wal-Mart. There wasn’t even a line at the pharmacy so we had the undivided attention of the pharmacy tech. We stated what we wanted, “we’d like to get these prescriptions refilled. The prescription is on file in Virginia.” The tech asked for our birth dates and home address and checked the computer file to be sure everything matched. She said it would be about 20 minutes and almost as an afterthought she added, “by the way, you will loose all your refills.” What? You can imagine our surprise. She tried to explain. Since we are of a “certain age” we have been dealing with doctors, prescriptions, pharmacies, and refills for quite some time and between us we have several college degrees, I don’t think it was entirely our stupidity that kept us from understanding what this 20 year old tech was saying. We finally figured out that she was using one word to describe two different things. No wonder it took a while for us to make since of what she was saying.

Apparently, New York state law dictates that only 1 refill can be issued from a prescription written in another state. Our only reasonable option was to take the one refill and have our doctors call in new prescriptions. The pharmacy tech was helpful enough to also tell us “by the way, we can only send out one prescription (what she really meant was “refill”) at a time to another state. Well, thanks. We are getting new prescriptions with 12 months of refills so for the next year the pharmacy in whatever state we happen to be will have to call Wal-Mart in Geneva, NY to get a refill. Why can New York send out a refill one at a time to another state and Virginia is required to send out the whole prescription? How cumbersome!