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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

I had to get someone life-critical medicine yesterday. My GP practice's computers were down because, presumably, of Crowdstrike. Manual pen-and-paper processes saved the day.

I wonder how many people didn't get so lucky?

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I was due to pick up my ADHD meds yesterday, and couldn't, for crowdstrike and reversion to paper reasons.

For me, it's mildly annoying, but I've got an emergency supply. The lines of truly desperate people with much more urgent needs than mine were long, and there was a lot of crying and despair in the lobby. I can only imagine the situation in larger cities.

This is what I was most curious about for this story. What exactly failed that meant the appointment had to be cancelled? If it was set up and planned for, presumably all the infrastructure was in place to conduct the fairly specific treatment.

Was this a first time prescription? If not, was there something that prevented the script from being filled earlier?

Is that relevant?

If there's something that says you can't fill the script until X days before previous runs out because of some "regulation", then yes, it is relevant. It's just another example of short sighted JIT style expectations that only compound situations like this where the supply chain is interrupted.

In usual quiescent conditions, the "insurance" companies often do their damnedest to delay medical care as long as they can get away with. I've had to suffer them only allowing one week of a prescription to be filled at a time, with fulfillment done by overnight shipping. I don't even think it's about saving money per se (overnight shipping of a refrigerated package isn't cheap, and I sure as shit wouldn't have been eating the cost of a misdelivery), but rather control for control's sake.

So ultimately it's not bona fide regulation taking away that last few weeks of slack and creating a needless mad rush, but rather the common setup of the "free market" unaccountably setting uniform policy in lock step, while you might get to choose which hold music you listen to.

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