Apparently now, according to he who saw fit to ban those dangerously big, surgery soft drinks from his city, 'Nanny Mike' seems to have now set his sights on yet another of what he sees as being a menace to the citizens of his fair city. 'Nanny Mike' is now on another mission, the purpose of which, apparently, is to once again seek out a method by which he can further ‘protect’ us from ourselves by using what some might describe as being rather unconventional tactics, to say the least. You see, what 'Nanny Mike' is now focused in on like a laser beam are some of the most common and most powerful prescription painkillers currently available on the market. Apparently, 'Nanny Mike' intends to justify his peculiar new policy by stating that the purpose of this new policy of his is to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s Emergency Rooms as a way to combat what he described as being a growing addiction problem in the region. 'Nanny Mike' states that is in an effort to crack down on what he called a citywide and national epidemic of prescription drug abuse. Look, I'm not a liberal, for which I thank my lucky stars each and every day, but this nutty idea just doesn't make much sense. And quite frankly, it shouldn't for anything one with even half a brain. I mean, to start with Emergency Rooms? Um, sorry but I'm just not getting that.
Under his new cockamamie policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days’ worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all. And lost, stolen or destroyed prescriptions will not be refilled. On his weekly radio show with John Gambling, ‘Nanny Mike’ said, "The city hospitals we control, so…we’re going to do it and we’re urging all of the other hospitals to do it, voluntary guidelines. Somebody said, oh, somebody wrote, ‘Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor.’" Mike added, "Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect….There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem." Is this not the typical kind of crap we always here from flaming liberal assholes like Mike. I'm sure he wouldn't mind suffering a little, right? After all, it would be for a good cause.
But critics, of which there appears to be a growing number, said that poor and uninsured patients frequently look to Emergency Rooms to perform the function of their primary source of medical care. These restrictions, they claim, could deprive doctors in the public hospital system, whose mission it is to treat these patients, of the necessary flexibility that they need to properly respond to patients. "Here is my problem with legislative medicine," said Dr. Alex Rosenau, president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians and senior vice chairman of emergency medicine at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Eastern Pennsylvania. "It prevents me from being a professional and using my judgment." While someone could fake a toothache to get painkillers, he said, another patient might have legitimate pain and not be able to get an appointment at a dental clinic for days. Or, he said, a patient with a hand injury may need more than three days of pain relief until the swelling goes down and an operation could be scheduled. But 'Nanny Mike,' like every other liberal on the entire planet, doesn't really give a squat about that. In fact, I think it safe to say that old 'Nanny Mike' couldn't care less! To liberals, like 'Nanny Mike's" way of thinking, doctors simply have no business practicing medicine, that should be left up entirely to the government!
Dr. Rosenau said that the college of emergency physicians had not developed an official position on the prescribing of painkillers in Emergency Rooms and that he appreciated 'Nanny Mike's' activism in the face of a serious public health problem. But, he said, it’s pain clinics in states like Florida and California, states where prescription drug abuse is rampant, as well as the household medicine cabinet, that are probably a more common source of unneeded painkillers than are the Emergency Rooms which 'Nanny Mike' has now targeted. City health officials have made the claim that these new ‘guidelines’ would not apply to patients who need prescriptions for cancer pain or palliative care, and drugs would still be available outside the Emergency Room. They said that in this era of patient-satisfaction surveys, doctors were often afraid to make patients unhappy by refusing drugs when they are requested, and the rules would give those doctors some support when they suspected that a patient might be faking pain to get drugs. "There will be no chance that the patients who need pain relief will not get pain relief," said Dr. Ross Wilson, senior vice president and chief medical officer of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city’s public hospitals. Then I would very much like to ask this moron, 'DR.' Rosee Wilson, what the hell's the point of this new policy?
Similar rules are said to have also been adopted in Washington State as well as in Utah. Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said opioid painkillers were not all that different from those highly addictive and more taboo street drugs like heroin. He called them "heroin in pill form." But what he doesn't say is whether or not those rules adopted in both Washington and Utah have made any kind of an appreciable difference in the problem that they were supposed to aid in addressing. More than two million prescriptions for opioid painkillers are written in New York City each year, the equivalent of a quarter of the city’s population, Dr. Farley said, and about 40,000, or like 5 tenths of one percent, New Yorkers are already dependent on painkillers and need treatment. Painkillers were involved in 173 accidental overdose deaths in New York City in 2010. I hate to sound cold here, but 173 people out of a population of over 8 million just doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me. I mean let’s put things into perspective here, shall we? That truly does fit the definition of being and infinitesimal amount, in the big scheme of things. Dr. Farley also said that while the city lacked the regulatory authority to ‘impose’ the new guidelines on its 50 or so private hospitals, several private hospitals have said they would adopt them voluntarily.
In the same radio interview, ‘Nanny Mike’ stressed the initiative’s simple rationale is to prevent extra pills from piling up in the cabinets of New Yorkers who no longer need them, where they can pose a health risk if they’re abused. "We talk about drugs, heroin and crack and marijuana, this is one of the big outbursts–and it’s a lot worse around the country than it is here. It’s kids and adults getting painkillers and using them for entertainment purposes, or whatever field of purposes, as opposed to what they are designed for," he explained. "If you break a leg, you’re going to be in pain, nothing wrong with getting something that reduces the pain. But if you get 20 days worth of pills and you only need them 3 days, there’s 17 days sitting there. Invariably some of the kids are going to find them, or you’re going to take them and get you addicted." 'Nanny Mike’ also tried to argue the point that the number of pain pills currently being prescribed had even contributed to an uptick in violent crimes outside of pharmacies from robbers looking to steal the drugs. "You see there’s a lot more hold-ups of pharmacies, people getting held up as they walk out of pharmacies," he explained. "What are they all about? They’re not trying to steal your shaving cream or toothpaste at the point of a gun. They want these drugs."
Look, the bottom line here is that this idea of ‘Nanny Mike’s’ is about as stupid as they came. To choose Emergency Rooms as being your primary place to implement a policy makes it all the more obvious that it is based more on politics than on any genuine concern for his fellow citizens. Rather than take any actions that would actually have a real impact on what he claims to be trying to accomplish, ‘Nanny Mike’ chooses to take what is the easy way out. And when all is said and done, no significant impact will have been made on the numbers of these drugs making it to the street. Meanwhile those folks who have come to depend on Emergency Room physicians will be made to bear the brunt of those unintended consequences that always result from liberal policies put into place by do-gooder liberals like ‘Nanny Mike.’ After all, what do you think the chances are that ‘Nanny Mike’ will ever having to worry about being without any of these medications, should he ever find himself in the position of actually needing them. And, really, when was the last time you think ‘Nanny Mike’ might have even shown up in the Emergency Room? I’d be willing to be that ‘Nanny Mike’ has never even seen the inside of an Emergency Room, any Emergency Room, unless he was there in some official capacity.
