The future of 340B, my perspective

The snippets below are taken from a recent article in Pharmacy Times: The Future of 340B: It’s All About Perspective

“Established more than 20 years ago [the 340B Drug Discount Program], this legislation was enacted to assist different health care settings in providing excellent care for indigent and vulnerable patients. To allow this to happen, safety net providers have access to discounted outpatient drugs from manufacturers. By being able to purchase the discounted medications, these qualifying organizations are able to utilize the savings to provide care for those uninsured and underinsured patients. “ – The 340B Drug Discount Program can be a great thing for healthcare systems that care for a lot of ‘uninsured’ or ‘underinsured’ patients. These are often time indigent patients.

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Saturday morning coffee [January 26 2013]

Amsterdam Coffee MugSo much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right comes straight from Amsterdam. I stopped there back in November 2011 on my way to Germany on a work trip. It’s a dirty city with a weird vibe to it. Everyone smokes and you better watch your butt or you’re likely to get run down by a bicycle, which appears to be a popular form of transportation. I walked through the Red Light District just to say that I’ve seen it. It was disturbing and depressing. It’s sad to see that kind of thing in my opinion.  Overall I didn’t like Amsterdam. You can have it. By the way, that’s a pretty big coffee mug. It hold a lot of coffee.

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Sad, but all too common experiences with healthcare

I read Warner Crocker’s musings at GottaBeMobile as well as his Tweets via the @LPH/tablet-pc-enthusiasts list on Twitter. Warner also has a second blog called Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2, which I do not read with any regularity. I was, however, driven toward his personal blog secondary to a Twitter post. The post, titled Rush and My Mom: Two Different Care Experiences, talks a little about his experiences with his mothers medical care. She is apparently very ill with lung cancer. I sympathize with Warner as my mother-in-law, Mary Lou, succumbed to lung cancer in December of 2008. I also understand much of what he is talking about as my wife and I experienced similar problems during Mary Lou’s chemotherapy, pain management and surgeries.

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