Lisa Adametz has been waiting for her cholesterol medication since July 29th. The postal service picked it up weeks ago from a Veterans Affairs hospital, but according to the tracking number, it has not yet been shipped, or even processed.
“I do not know what’s going on, it’s just there,” said Adametz, who lives an hour outside Las Vegas in Nevada.
Americans across the country are waiting for the post. While this can be annoying when you are waiting for a package from Amazon, for people like Adametz who are waiting for dispatch of medication, delays can be a danger to their health.
Although retail pharmacies still issue a personal majority of all prescriptions nationwide, mail order – in part driven by insurers and providers who require it – is a major segment of the $ 500 billion prescription drug market. The U.S. Postal Service shipped 1.2 billion orders last year alone, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers. People dependent on email to receive their medication are left extremely vulnerable to the kind of disruptions the USPS has suffered in recent weeks.
CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and ExpressScripts, all of which are the nation’s largest pharmacies in terms of volume, told BuzzFeed News that they were not affected by the problems at USPS. OptumRx, which completes about 500 million mail order deliveries a year, most of them shipped by the Postal Service, said it is monitoring the situation and carriers will change as needed. Humana, which is heavily demanding on the Postal Service to deliver presents to its more than 13 million customers, recently posted on Facebook, “Some present orders may take a little longer than expected, but it is nothing that can not be arranged” ; the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment. PillPack, an Amazon service that uses a variety of carriers – including USPS – to deliver presents, also said it was monitoring all delays. In some cases, it uses UPS to send transfers to patients The Department of Veterans Affairs said the vast majority of its patients still receive presents on time.
However, reports of delays in medication are widespread and many people across the country are already clearly experiencing delays receiving critical medication. In interviews with nearly a dozen people described patients wait anywhere from three days to two weeks longer than normal for their medications to arrive. Some said they feel compelled by mail order because their insurance plans require them to use only mail order or require them to pay more (sometimes significantly more) out of pocket to use a retail pharmacy. For others, especially in rural areas, there is simply no local pharmacy to visit.
The delays come after Louis DeJoy, who became postmaster general in June, refurbished the USPS – reducing or eliminating overtime, removing e-sorting machines and reorganizing the agency’s management. Even before DeJoy was, the USPS was for a time a target for President Trump, who recently said he would block emergency funds for the financially dire bureau. While this may limit the agency’s ability to deliver millions of ballots quickly shipped in November, it already affects regular mail services for countless Americans – many of whose lives literally depend on timely delivery.
After serving in the first Gulf War, Adametz began to seize. She also has post-traumatic stress disorder and had her gallbladder removed when doctors found severe blockages while trying to treat painful kidney stones. Because of the fittings she does not drive either. Although the VA delivers 80% of all its presents by mail, it does allow local pickups, but Adametz lives an hour from the local VA hospital, so she trusts the U.S. Postal Service instead to get her medication.
Without her cholesterol medication, which she ran out of at the end of July, she makes sure to review her diet and stay hydrated – temperatures in Nevada have recently risen 115 degrees. “I really have a high risk of kidney stones” without that medication, she said.
She has had enough of her asthma medication for now, but her antidepressants are now running low as well. Yet, she said, at least she gets through. ‘I’m worried about the people who need heart medication. “There are people who are in worse situations than I am,” said Adametz. “You can not play Monopoly with people’s lives,” she added.
According to Veterans Affairs, prescriptions take an average of about three days to ship and 95% of prescriptions arrive on time to their patients, said Christina Noel, a spokeswoman for the department. (Noel did not indicate how this has changed from previous years.)
“The VA always encourages veterans to order routine presents in advance. When it comes to emerging regulations, VA either fills them on the spot or uses commercial carriers to guarantee on-time delivery, “Noel added.
Still, for veterans like Herbert Arce – who had been ordering his prescriptions a week in advance from the VA for 15 years – that alone was not enough to get his blood pressure medication and antidepressants on time. It took three weeks for his July presents to arrive – he left him two medications without medication for two whole weeks.
“I was having a headache for not having my medication for blood pressure,” Arce said, adding that he was just trying to take more vitamin D to replace his antidepressants in the meantime.
The 54-year-old is located three hours from his nearest hospital in VA, in a rural town of 1,200 people in northern Maine.
On August 6, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan placed a call for people who have problems with their mail delivery to share their stories. To date, the survey has received more than 7,000 responses (mostly from its state) – 650 of them, roughly 9%, cite problems with delivery of their medication, according to an analysis by its office.
“It’s clear that the new policy, directed by Postmaster – General DeJoy, is hurting people who use the Postal Service as a lifeline for their daily needs, including Michiganders who rely on life-saving instructions they receive in the mail. “Peters, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
While the need for immediate drug delivery is urgent compared to many other types of email, USPS told BuzzFeed News that it does not have a separate method for processing and delivering prescription drugs. “These items are handled based on the class in which they are sent, Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express or First Class Mail, and the choice is decided by the sender,” according to her statement.
Post workers told BuzzFeed News that they are looking into the delays in real time. Kevin Michel, who works as the postprocessor at a location in Maryland, said there have been weekly policy changes that have affected the speed of delivery. There are usually three trucks delivered by mail to his location every day, but lately, he said, they have instructed the principals not to process the third truck until the next day, so that carriers can get on their routes faster.
‘It’s pretty clear he’s trying to carry the post. It’s not a question, “said Michel, referring to DeJoy. “Everyone is frustrated.”
That has consequences for many Americans who are sitting waiting for their prescriptions
“Honestly, I’m furious,” Allyson Mathis, a resident of Moab, Utah, a city of about 5,000 people, told BuzzFeed News. Mathis’ presentation recently took about six days to reach the post office, about twice as long as usual. “I’m scared, I’m angry, I’m scared,” she said of the resident’s goal against USPS.
In Johnson County, Kansas, Adrienne Kreutz said Aetna Specialty Pharmacy, which had completed its orders by mail, had recently contacted her to say that in advance she could pick up her son’s prescription at a local CVS due to delays . “When I got that conversation about the CVS thing, my immediate reaction was, oh shit, this is really happening. Not just the medications; all as a whole. It’s just awful, ‘she said.
In St. Louis told Ryan Markel that he went two days without his maintenance medication for Type 2 diabetes because it took six days instead of the normal two days. He had to limit his diet to protein, fat, and water until it arrived. “I should have ordered it sooner,” he said. “The US Postal Service was the most reliable delivery service I have handled, including private carriers like UPS and FedEx, and Amazon. It has very quickly become one of the least reliable methods. ”
One California resident, who asked not to be named, said his eye medication took about 20 days to arrive from the time they were ordered from the local VA.
“I see the U.S. Postal Service as a public service, and I should not be expected to turn a profit, especially since it serves subordinate areas with lower incomes,” Markle said. “And so I find today’s events very annoying.”
As the US presidential election approaches, delays in the Postal Union will also affect voters. Both Adametz and Arce – the two veterans who have drug delays – described themselves as former Republicans who have “never become Trumpers” in recent years. Delays by the US Postal Service have only increased their frustrations.
“I have always valued being Republicans, especially in the military,” said Adametz, who added that she has changed her affiliation to Independent since Trump took office. Now, she said, she simply can no longer support the president. “A lot of people get hurt by this pointless act.”
