Prescriptions and New York State

[Kent & Peggy]

Beware of getting ongoing prescriptions filled in New York State. We did this with my wife's prescriptions last month and per the pharmacy, state law REQUIRES the pharmacy to cancel any further refills of the prescriptions. We are now struggling to get the Physician and the Pharmacy together to get the prescriptions refilled since they are no longer valid.

[AFChap]

state law REQUIRES the pharmacy to cancel any further refills of the prescriptions

Say again?? ...state law will not allow a NY pahrmacy to provide refills of a prescription... You have to have left out some important details as I know people in New York do in fact get precrsciptions with regular refills.

- Controlled substances?
- Trying to get refills by mail?
- Trying to transfer prescriptions for controlled substances to another pharmacy? (Texas allow only one transfer I believe)
- ???

[Kent & Peggy]

We had been transferring Rx from AZ to CO to SD to Mi to NY - when we transferred to NY they canceled all remaining refills. These were NOT for controlled Medications. It was a total shock to us.

[porscheracer]

I assume it must vary from state to state. In AR, you may only transfer a prescription once - after that it becomes invalid.

[Roam America]

I beleive laws do vary by state. When we were in S. Dakota last year my wife transferred a perscription to a local WalMart there. They would only do this once. After that we had to get the doctor to provide a new perscription.

[Digital Boy]

We learned of this NY boondoggle before going to Long Island for 5 months in 2007.

The solution is to have your personal physician write a separate set of prescriptions for the time period you expect to be in NY - up to 12 months.

All mt prescriptions are at CVS. We have no problem transferring them to any state we've been to other than NY. When we got to NY we just handed the CVS pharacist the 2nd set of scripts.

When we left NY we reverted back to the original scripts.

[paz]

Wow! Thanks for the heads-up. We have been transferring prescriptions from Walmart to Walmart all over the country and have never run into this. I can see that they might only fill the script only once, but CANCELING any remaining refills is taking it to an extreme.

[Digital Boy]

New York is like a foreign country with many strange rules of law - not just regarding prescriptions.

I was a life insurance agent for 30+ years. I learned early that many insurance companies domiciled outside of NY had to form separate companies in NY to operate in NY.

By doing this, the agents and policies they sold in the rest of the USA did NOT have to conform to NY law.

Many of the life policies sold by the non-NY companies were both richer in benefits to the buyer and higher in commission payouts to the agent.

NY domiciled insurance companies could sell policies all over the USA too. But, those policies were consistant with NY law.

Ask any New York Life agent!

[Barbaraok]

This is one of the reasons that we use a mail order pharmacy and all of our meds are sent to our Livingston address and just forwarded on with the next mail shipment.

Barb

[Digital Boy]

Unfortunately for me, my group plan (BCBS of FL)will only pay for 30 day renewals from a listed pharmacy. So we carry extra prescription orders when going to NY.

[paz]

Originally posted by Barbaraok:
This is one of the reasons that we use a mail order pharmacy and all of our meds are sent to our Livingston address and just forwarded on with the next mail shipment.

Barb

Our insurance requires us to use mail order for on-going meds. This is convenient, BUT many of our scripts are on the Walmart $4 list ($10 for a 90-day supply), which is less than our co-pay. Therefore, we get some of our meds through Walmart and don't even submit them to insurance. We'll have to remember to stock up beforehand if we ever plan to spend time in NY.

[R1Kirby]

So is it any wonder why more and more people are leaving New York? After three years there, I had enough.