On this last day of January, 2008, I was tasked with the pickup up a prescription for a dear old friend. It could not have come at a worse time. I was struggling to meet a timetable to catch an airplane out of town.
I stood at the “prescription pickup” station at the pharmacy and I waited and I waited. When I inquired, “what is the problem”, it was revealed that the pharmacy computer was having difficulty chit chatting with the health insurance computer and approving partial payment for the medications prescribed. Finally, I asked if I could pay cash for the medication and let the computers fight it out in the days to come. Well, nothing speeds up a transaction like cash. The bill for thirty pills was $159.95. I was a little surprised at the price and asked the pharmacy technician if she ever had patients show up with a prescription without insurance and when faced with the price, turned down the medication. She looked at me straight into my eyes and said, “Mr. Jennings, every morning, every afternoon and every evening.”
Upon further questioning she shared with me that patients routinely turned down insulin to battle diabetes, diuretics to fight congestive heart failure and routine medications to control high blood pressure, to name a few. Of 300 million U.S. citizens, nearly 50 million have no health insurance. One in six Americans face choices the majority of us find unthinkable. Who are these people?
We provide Universal coverage for streets and highways. All 300 millions Americans have access to our road system. It is considered a public utility. Even if you do not have an automobile, you can walk along the highways and byways of America. We have chosen as a society not to refer to this reality as socialized highways. Our society views highways as a service that all citizens should have made available to them and road construction companies compete for the business and are paid to build and re-build these highways for our individual and collective benefit.
Would it not make sense for America and Americans to find a way to pay pharmaceutical companies to provide medications that promote life, health and improve the quality of life for all of our citizens? For American business, would this not improve productivity, reduce lost work days and serve the interests of business and industry. There is someone out there in cyberspace that will read this and accuse me of being in favor of socialized medicine, a new expletive in our lexicon.
Rotary International provided universal access to polio vaccine to every person in the world. They raised the money on their own and developed a distribution system for polio vaccine to essentially eradicate polio throughout the world. If you have ever attended a Rotary meeting, you would not come away from the experience thinking of these men and women as wide eyed flaming liberals or socialists. They saw an opportunity to improve public health throughout the world and filled a long standing international leadership void.
Where will the leadership come from to provide healthcare to our citizens as a public utility? I have no interest in socialized medicine. I am not even certain what that term means. It strikes me that our friends throughout Western Europe have found numerous models to finance medical care in ways that are universal and at the same time extraordinarily private. This subject frequently causes people to start yammering about the Canadian Healthcare System. I can honestly say that in almost forty years of service to the American healthcare delivery system I have never met one person advocate that America follow the lead of Canada in anything but hockey.
My guess is that the leadership will emerge to bring common sense to this issue. It is not American for many of our best citizens to be embarrassed in American pharmacies; to shrink away in embarrassment because they cannot afford a simple medication to enrich or extend their lives.
Jan R. Jennings
