Tuesday, November 06, 2012

CVS Being Sued Over Ready Fill


I have a CVS Pharmacy within walking distance from my apartment complex so that's the pharmacy we usually use. It's like right next door to my complex, so it's close and close is good for someone without a car for the past few years. 

We have lived in this neighborhood for 14 years and the CVS pharmacy has been there the whole time and while living here and going to CVS we started using their pharmacy to fill our prescriptions. We had been using Smith's Pharmacy up the street but they were slow and half the time not there, would ignore you or just plain rude, I don't like the employee's at the Smith's up the street from me. So we used CVS to fill our prescriptions...that is until they started enrolling us in their ready fill program. 

Now let me tell you about this program and how it affected us. When you go to CVS to have a prescription filled, they automatically enroll you into their ready fill program where they automatically fill your prescriptions each month on the day you first got it filled, call you and let you know they are ready to be picked up. 

Now for most people that might be alright, but for someone like me who has a co pay of up to $6 per prescription and at the time I was on 6-9 prescriptions per month...that comes to around $40 a month. I have to wait until I get paid before I can get my prescriptions so I like to call them in myself when I have the money, it doesn't make sense to me for them to fill it if I won't have the money to pay for them for a whole week or two and sometimes that happened. 

So they would fill them, call me and tell me to come pick them up because they were ready and I would tell the lady that I didn't call and ask for them to be filled, that I wouldn't have the money to get them for another week. She would say ok and I thought that would be the end of it...but no, another person would call the next day and the next and the next until I came the next week to finally get them. And when I asked to be taken off the Ready Fill, I was told it was an automatic courtesy service and I could NOT be unrolled in it. That it was an automatic thing their computer system did for their customers. 

After a few months of this non-sense..I took my business elsewhere to a pharmacy that waited for me to call them and let them know I wanted my prescriptions filled, they even mail them to me for free since I don't have a car to pick them up. 

So imagine my surprise when I saw on the news last night that people are suing CVS pharmacy over this ready fill business. Former pharmacists are coming forward to say that there were quotas for the ready fill and if people didn't come and pick their prescriptions up when they were ready the store was docked pay. How crazy is that? I'm glad I took my business elsewhere more than a year ago now.