A Richmond resident is urging caregivers to double-check their family members’ pharmacy receipts – after discovering her 98-year-old grandmother had been wrongly billed almost $1,400 in dispensing fees.
Brandie Mol, who has power of attorney over her grandmother Norma’s finances, said she only found out by chance in July that, for nine months, CareRX had been charging dispensing fees on a plethora of weekly prescriptions, instead of billing the private health plan provider.
Mol said she informed CareRX - which delivers the prescriptions direct to Norma’s care home at Courtyard Gardens - straight away, but it took until September for the matter to be resolved.
A spokesperson for CareRX told the Richmond News that the company kicked off a manual audit of the account as soon as it was alerted in July to the alleged discrepancy.
However, according to Mol, the company continued to bill her dementia-suffering grandmother the disputed dispensing fees for the rest of the summer.
“I get that mistakes are made, but why would they keep charging her the fees after I’d pointed out the mistake? said Mol.
“It took me more than two months to sort this out and I’d be concerned there are other vulnerable people in the same position as my grandmother getting charged these fees without even realizing.
“They finally acknowledged over the phone that a mistake had been made and that they would be refunding the money to my grandmother’s account.
“But they refused to send anything in writing about the mistake and refund.”
Pharmacy claimed it kicked off audit immediately
In its statement to the News, a spokesperson for CareRX said that it was an “administrative error” and that “accurate customer billing is a priority at CareRx and we take matters like this very seriously.”
The spokesperson added that the company - which claims to be "Canada’s leading provider of pharmacy services" - could not go into specific details about the client in question for privacy reasons, but did acknowledge that Mol contacted them about her concerns in late July.
“We immediately began an audit of the resident’s billing history. Given that the audit is a manual process that is time intensive, we informed the resident’s granddaughter that this would take some time,” said the spokesperson.
“Upon completion of that audit, it was determined that there was an error with the Pharmacy Enrollment Package that resulted in medications not being billed to the private insurance company correctly.
“As with any pharmacy, where a medication is rejected for reimbursement by the insurance provider or the pharmacy does not have the correct insurance information, the patient is billed directly and is responsible for submitting their out-of-pocket costs to their insurance company.
“When the error was identified, we immediately corrected the misinformation in our system, contacted the insurance company on behalf of the resident, and promptly reimbursed the resident for the full amount of the fees that were incorrectly billed.”
CareRX, added the spokesperson, has also “put specific flags on the resident’s account to prevent this from occurring again.
“We sincerely regret the frustration the resident and her family experienced.”
The company said it has a “robust audit process that includes monthly checks on all resident billings,” noting that it believes the incident with Mol’s grandmother was “isolated.”
As for continuing to bill Norma Mol for the dispensing fees after the error had been highlighted, CareRX said it wanted the client's continuity of care to remain intact while the matter was investigated.
Mol, meanwhile, has contacted her local MP, Parm Bains, and local MLA, Henry Yao, and still concerned her grandmother is not alone.
