Case Study: Required Medicaid Lock-In Program

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Required Medicaid Lock-in Program Medicaid is a federal and state funded program for people who can’t afford medical care. Through taxes, Missouri residents currently help pay the medical care for approximately 818,900 patients. Those patients consist of people who legitimately need help and who follow the rules of the system and people who try to cheat the system. Within the Medicaid system is a lock-in program that helps eliminate harmful practices such as medication abuse and the duplication of medical services and treatments. The way the program works is simple. Physicians and Pharmacists can request that a patient be entered into the lock-in program based on his or her actions that exhibit a possible drug seeking behavior. The…show more content…
The lock-in program would help lower the amount of people abusing prescription medication. The lock-in program would also ease the minds of physicians and pharmacists who are fighting a constant battle of keeping track of patients on controlled medications. Even though Americans will pay taxes on Medicaid regardless, many people would feel more at ease knowing their money wasn’t going toward funding the habits of drug abusers. Any patient that seeks assistance from Medicaid should be entered into the lock-in program to help lower the amount of controlled substance abuse, to ease the minds of doctors and pharmacists, and to ensure American tax dollars are spent more…show more content…
This presents a problem not only for the providers and other employees, but also for the patients who legitimately require the use of narcotics for their pain control. Recently more physicians are hesitant to write narcotic drug prescriptions for their patients because the manpower to keep track of the people on these medications is not available. Doctors and pharmacists are required to take many unnecessary steps to ensure that the people receiving narcotic drugs are doing so legally. In order to protect themselves from audits by the Drug Enforcement Agency and malpractices suits, more and more doctors are calling each pharmacy before prescribing pain medication to ensure that a ptient is only using one pharmacy. Upon receiving a controlled prescription, the pharmacist will also call other pharmacies to check a patient history and then call the patient’s insurance carrier, if one is available, to check even further. This is a very time consuming process that could be made less extensive if the Medicaid lock-in program was a requirement. The doctors would only have one pharmacy to contact and the pharmacy would only have to check their own records to make sure the patient was due for the medication. The lock-in program would allow the doctors and pharmacists to do their job more effectively and use their time more wisely for patients who need genuine
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