As anyone who listens to my podcasts likely knows, I live with a number of chronic health conditions, have a mother who has been a nurse her entire life and as such am fairly intimately familiar with the state of so-called health care in this shithole of a nation.
Let’s start from the top – Prescriptions. Now if the worst that you’ve ever had to deal with is an antibiotic or basic Class I med then you luckily haven’t seen the sociopathic side of insurance/pharmaceutical industries. I take a (as classified by my insurance company) Class IV medication which “requires” use of a specialty pharmacy. Now there is no actual requirement, the medication does not require compounding or any such true specialty dispensation. In fact what is occurring in this situation is that my insurance company (who is of course owned by United Health Care) has “vertically integrated” the high value drugs into their own pharmacy company in order to consolidate the profits into the corporate structure.
Now, having health issues I have a secondary insurance company to cover the co-pays and the litany of other expenses and differences in coverage that my craptastic (yet costing $400+/month) primary insurance refuses to pay out for. So you would think that any differences in the medication cost would be picked up by my secondary insurance (as that is their purpose after all). Nope. My secondary insurance also requires the use of their own “specialty pharmacy”. So now we find ourselves firmly into a Catch-22 situation. Both insurance companies require me to utilize their own pharmacy and neither will work with each other. The primary insurance company’s specialty pharmacy refuses to work with my secondary insurance at all and the secondary insurance’s specialty pharmacy can’t run my prescription because my primary insurance is required to be utilized before the secondary or else they will auto-reject whatever is being processed – yet the primary insurance won’t work at all with the secondary specialty pharmacy.
Well FUUUUUUUUCK ME!
So my only actual option is to run the prescription through my primary’s specialty pharmacy but my ever so amazing and wonderful primary insurance resets my deductible every new year. I used to have a single deductible but they decided several years back that their existing amount of blood money wasn’t enough to sate their serial killer-esque desires so they split off the pharmaceutical deductible from the procedural deductible as well. So for the first month I am left holding the bag on the full cost of the insanely overpriced medication that I take. That’s $2,000 USD. Then they’ll SPLIT (50/50) the rest with me after I pay a total of $3,000 USD up front.
The only option I am left with is to apply for public/private co-payment assistance programs. Understand that fully. I have coverage from not one but TWO insurance companies/policies and I still can’t get my medication covered due to the blatantly crooked systemic manipulations by these corporate human rights violators.
If you think for even one second that I am unique in finding myself in this situation you’d be sorely mistaken. I am but one of millions of Americans who are being mentally and physically tortured by this process. Every January I have to scramble and wonder if I am going to be allowed access to my necessary and life-saving medication for a few months more. I have no guarantee, no assurance that even though I can walk down to a local pharmacy and likely find said medication that I would be given access to it.
This, this is why we must not reform but destroy the for-profit American sick care system. But make no mistake, this isn’t accidental or a fluke of circumstance. This situation we as a nation find ourselves in is firmly intentional. It is a method of oppression by the ruling class and as such should be treated like the violent assault on our human rights and liberties that it is.
Every day in this backward-ass nation of ours, someone dies from completely preventable circumstances due to our greedy, corrupt and inhumane medical system. It is time to take back these industries. It is time to nationalize them as a direct punishment for their collective actions and it is also time to treat the C-level management of these companies as the criminals they are and prosecute them for the litany of deaths and suffering they have caused. Not a slap on the wrist, not “club-fed” punishments but fully served lifetime sentences in super-max prisons with all the other irredeemable serial-killers.
