OHIP'S GALLING DRUG RULES

ALWAYS COMPLICATE THINGS

I have never taken more pills.
 It seems I get a new prescription every year.
Which makes me popular at Shoppers Drug Mart when I'm not bitching about a problem in reordering.
Take the latest example. I see I'm low on something called ezetimibe so I call in and reorder.  Two days later, I go through the normal hassle of trying to park near the Shoppers at Royal York and Bloor and Mary runs in to collect my order. They have nothing for me.
Return home and phone. This time the story changes to that I tried to reorder while I still had 10 pills and the government won't pay until you have less than that number.
Now Mary and I run into this all the time even with such a minor maintenance drug as ezetimibe which reduces the amount of cholesterol absorbed by the body and isn't to my knowledge a hot item in the drug world.
I have taken allopurinol for two decades to end vicious attacks of gout no matter how carefully I ate. Heaven help me if I try to get these pills before the government-appointed time. Yet allopurinol is  a drug that people take for years and isn't sold in dark doorways. How about enough to last three months.
I would like to know what OHIP bureaucrat is responsible for these arbitrary rules on when you can reorder minor drugs which are not on anyone's hit list of hallucinatory delights.
 I would drown them in pills and forms, or have their parents lecture them on getting a reasonable number of minor pills on each visit.
Now once a year, if you talk nicely about Barry Phillips, the veteran pharmacist who presides genially over his Drug Mart empire in central Etobicoke, and offer up your first born into servitude along with a second mortgage on the house, you can play snowbird and wing off to Florida or some warmer clime with even, heavens, a couple of months of pills.
But reordering drugs goes on month after month after month, not just once a year, and there are many people trying to grab a little order out of the chaos by putting together the daily allotment of pills two weeks in advance.
There are new people surfing above 65 every week,  and while all of us appreciate the drug help we get grudgingly from OHIP, we really do want to reduce the number of trips to even such a fine establishment as the Shoppers Drug Mart in the heart of the Kingsway.
After all, waiting cabs cluster around the Royal York subway station like bees around the hive, and there is a steady flow of  traffic behind the drug store on the one-way lane - with dumb drivers regularly going the wrong way.
We will have to move the Tim Hortons to get any help from the cops.
I doubt if the drug scene is going to explode if drug stores are allowed to renew a prescription while, heavens, the patients actually has more than 10, but our medicrats say they know best. That is one reason why our medical spending takes more than 40% of the provincial budget because of all the extra steps they insist are necessary.