Jan Stowe saw countless patients go through layoffs in her 40-year nursing career, but last month she experienced it even when the U.S. Postal Service did not provide her medication for chronic back pain and muscle spasms.
A nurse veteran during and after the Vietnam War, Stowe said she could identify her own symptoms but could not help but wait in her Traverse City, Michigan, home.
“I was crazy. I was scared. I could not concentrate. I stepped. I felt disgusted. I sat sweating. It was all symptoms, ”Stowe said of last month’s experience. ‘I mean, I never took heroin, but I cared for drug addicts. Now I know how it feels. ”
Stowe, whose back problems forced her to retire, is among thousands of Americans who have missed their prescription drugs due to delays in postal services. A dramatic drop in time deliveries since the beginning of July has put lives at risk as a growing number of people depend on getting their prescriptions by mail.
The Postal Service manages 1.2 billion present medical shipments per year – or about 4 million every day, six days a week – the National Association of Letter Carriers reported earlier this year. That number has grown during the pandemic, and many recipients accuse President Donald Trump and the White House of delaying posts to undermine post-under vote. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said last week that he would stop all operational changes to the Postal Service until after the election to avoid any impact on the right to vote by post. But that does not address secondary effects, such as delayed regulations and the economic fallout on small businesses.
Erin Fox, a pharmacotherapy professor at the University of Utah, emphasizes that most prescriptions that are fulfilled through the post treat chronic conditions, rather than short-term prescriptions, such as a course of antibiotics.
She said these medications often treat cholesterol as high blood pressure – and without them, patients could have heart attacks or strokes – but also consist of inhalers, insulin and anti-rejection medications for people who have organ transplants.
“Delays with the postal system are very concerning because patients may not be able to access the chronic medications they need,” she said.
For Ray Carolin, an Air Force veteran and former Secret Service agent who lives in Lafayette, Indiana, delayed medication can be the difference between life and death. If the postal service does not deliver the drugs sent by the Veterans Administration, which fulfills 80 percent of its prescriptions by mail, Carolin is left to find the drugs he needs and is forced out of the bag. pay.
“Those drugs are pretty important to me – they keep me alive,” Carolin said. ‘And on one occasion I had to drive 60 miles to go to the VA hospital in Indy because I had not been given heart medicine. And on another drug I had to take, I had to go locally to CVS Pharmacy here in Lafayette, as opposed to over to Indianapolis, and I had to buy my medicine because I did not get it from VA. ”
Sens. Bob Casey and Elizabeth Warren, from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively, are trying to address the issue by reaching out to the companies that actually complete the presentations.
The two Senate Democrats sent a series of letters to the top five post-order pharmacies and pharmacy profit managers – including service of Cigna, CVS and Walgreens – about the delays in deliveries of prescription drugs sent to the elderly, veterans and millions other Americans, who, she wrote, opposed “serious risks if President Trump’s attempts to demote the postal service result in delays and interruptions.”
Casey told NBC News that he received more than 97,000 letters from constituencies about the policies pursued by DeJoy, a longtime Republican ally and former logistics manager who admitted Friday during a congressional hearing that his changes had caused some of the delays.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, pressed Friday on DeJoy about prescription drugs, told him about the “heartbreaking stories” he’d heard, and shared the anecdote of a veteran with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who reached out to his office after a long wait to receive his inhaler.
“We are working here briefly to run the system, add stability and also hire more workers to handle the delivery process,” said DeJoy. “We all feel bad about the dip in our service level.”
Components from all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties have been reached to Casey’s office, from “veterans missing medicines in Clarion County to small business owners in Wexford, who rely on reputable postal services to deliver their products to their customers” , “said Casey.
“I have heard of young families with immunocompromised children waiting for days for mail to fill their blank prescriptions in the suburbs of our key metro areas,” the senator added. “The sabotage of the Trump administration at the USPS is being felt in Pennsylvania, but we know it is particularly damaging to rural communities.”
What many may not realize is that the insurance sector forced many regulations or heavily encouraged them to send by mail, Fox said. All major insurance companies have a mail order system, which makes the patient cheaper and easier – especially since they do not always have to remember to fill in their prescriptions themselves.
But if patients stop taking medication and try to switch to a local pharmacy, they may run into a number of stumbling blocks.
“In some cases, the insurer just can’t afford it, and then they can pay them a lot more,” Fox said. ‘Logistically, it’s an objection. They have to make phone calls and try things to change, and it is not an easy process to do so. ”
It is also a very long time to deal with these issues, as many Americans at risk with existing circumstances have sent them to postal delivery for prescriptions because they want to avoid public spaces during the coronavirus pandemic.
Max Cooper, a Pennsylvania doctor who works outside of Philadelphia, said he received his submissions three months’ prescriptions when COVID-19 began sweeping the country because they were vulnerable to the disease. Mail delivery has also helped.
But after hearing about these postal delays, Cooper – a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who now works with the Committee to Protect Medicare – said he was quick to tell the people he was treating right after. t they came from the battlefield in Helmand province, one of the most dangerous regions in Afghanistan, and those he helped in Philadelphia at the VA hospital, where he volunteered.
All of them probably depend on the VA for their prescription medications, and most receive their medications by mail.
“Every single shift I was there was a veteran in some psychiatric crisis, where they were struggling because they could not get the antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications they clearly needed. to treat her service-related psychiatric disorders, “he said of his time at work at VA Hospital. “I saw veterans have stroke, suffering from diabetes and heart problems.”
“This is just one more way to prevent these people from getting the drugs they so critically need,” Cooper added. “That means more veterans will have heart attacks, strokes and die early lives full of unnecessary suffering.”
Casey said the email crisis marks the need for USPS to receive additional funding, although Trump has previously threatened to fight against any bill raised by dollars for the federal agency. However, Congress continues to debate whether the Postal Service should provide $ 25 billion to help it through the pandemic.
The Pennsylvania senator plans “by pressuring the administration to increase funding for USPS and reverse the damaging policies that are causing the delays in service.”
For patients like Stowe, that pressure is necessary to prevent “the misery” she said she was experiencing, which prevented her from being able to turn her head or neck. While her pain medication was life-changing, she said, there are many others who need her medication to survive.
“We just have to get the Postal Service funded because so many people trust it for their medicines,” Stowe said. “Without it, people will die.”
