What if you were about to be released from the hospital after major surgery and complications due to a major abdominal infection and they tell you that the only antibiotic that you are responding to costs $200 a day for two pills? In fact this not so good news is prefaced by the platitude, "I hope you have good insurance." Thankfully, the insurance company did agree to cover this medicine for seven days because it was better than the alternative, paying for an additional week of hospital stay so that this medicine could be administered intravenously. This is a true story. It happened to a family member today.
Of course the real travesty here is the cost of the medicine. One hundred dollars for one pill is an outrage. There is nothing to stop pharmaceutical companies from charging whatever they want for certain drugs. Drug prices are one part of the healthcare equation, and as we know with Medicare Part D, affordable medicine is a necessity. Too bad it is costing the taxpayer a fortune because there is no provision to negotiate drug prices. We should be demanding drug price negotiation as part of this healthcare reform for it would be a key step in helping to control Medicare costs, savings from which are supposed to help defray the costs of reform in the first place.
Rational minds agree that without a public insurer to compete with private insurers, the cost of healthcare coverage will continue to escalate. Without a public option, there will be an enforced 46,000,000 more customers for the private insurers to gouge. Yeah! So, in effect the Republicans are fighting against a public option that would help to bring down coverage costs in the same way that they fought against a provision to include drug price negotiation when they and President Bush passed Medicare Part D. With the Republicans and the fringe protesters shouting so loud as to effectively cloud our judgment, we are on our way to healthcare reform that will further enrich private insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
Everybody has an expensive healthcare story, that alone should tell us all something.
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