SIMPLICITY NO LONGER ALLOWED
I fear I have quoted Thoreau too often here, but "Our lives are frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." is one of the codes of my life. Ole' Henry David could not have stood in the shoes of the Ole' Apothecary and remained sane. He would have seen so much of his beloved ease and common sense eroded rapidly.
I recall this:
Nineteen seventy-eight. A new patient comes to my window with a handwritten prescription for ampicillin 250 mg po qid #28 from a local doctor. I obtain his demographics and he hands me a Medicaid card. My technician rushes forward with the drug and a form. She is typing the label on our manual typewriter and counting out the capsules while I counsel the patient. I check the final product and hand it to the patient with an official receipt handwritten on the bag. There was no co-pay and no online adjudication in those days (the claim might be rejected weeks later, but usually not if I have a permanent Medicaid card and not a temporary one). Time for this whole from arrival to departure: about 3 minutes (faster than that if it was a cash sale; the prescription would retail for about $3, and this wasn't the "generic deal" of today--the average retail price of a prescription at the time was $8). The technician would complete the Medicaid claim form later, and also later, manually post the prescription information on a paper profile card. There were no drive-thrus or cell phones. No touch-tone phones yet, either.
Well, not every patient encounter went like that, but it was possible. Why counseling in 1978? That state passed a counseling law in 1975. We were doing it when it wasn't cool.
Also, the cash register was analog, not digital. If you have ever seen one of those, it was because you are as old as I am or you ran across one in an antique shop or at a swap meet. This thing would make a lot of noise, too, almost like a machine gun. On You Tube recently, I saw a cute video of a fellow complaining about the size and complexity of today's cash register receipts. I identify; in the day, ours was a little strip of paper with the price of each item, the total, the amount tendered, and the amount of the change, plus a date. End of story. Oh, yeah, I think the company name was on there somewhere, too.
So, compare to our frittered-away lives of 2008.
