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VET DISCOVERS $265 DRUG COSTS JUST $8 AT THE VA
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If the government can provide reasonably priced
medical
care for veterans, why is it so difficult for
Congress to
come up with a health care system for everyone
else?
For more about prescriptions, use the VA
Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/
sessearch.php?q=prescriptio
n+prescriptions&op=or
Story here...
http://desmoinesregister.
com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2007
0904/NEWS/709040377/-1/ENT05
Story below:
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$265 drug cost has teacher asking questions
By MARC HANSEN
REGISTER NEWS COLUMNIST
Ralph Snyder, the 81-year-old Des Moines PE teacher who turns up in this
column more than he should, recently had surgery for a double hernia.
He still feels like a diced sausage, but that's not why you're reading
this. You're reading this because of what happened when Snyder went to
the pharmacy to have his prescription filled.
First he went to one pharmacy, which directed him to another, which said
his insurance company refused to cover the expense and that'll be $265
please - for five injections of the blood thinner Lovenox.
Two hundred sixty-five dollars! Snyder could have used a shot then and
there because he nearly had a stroke when he saw the bill.
A hernia operation by itself wouldn't have set him back that much a few
years ago.
Snyder, who suddenly felt like one of the 46 million uninsured
Americans, now understands why about half the bankruptcies in the United
States are related to medical costs.
I gently explained to Snyder that it was his fault for living too long.
The biggest medical bills these days usually come in the later stages of
a person's life. He should have planned ahead.
"Thirty years ago," a Harvard law professor recently told Newsweek
magazine, "families didn't go bankrupt over an illness. Today people
survive illness and accidents that would have killed them a generation
ago."
Modern medicine, the professor continued, "can make the body well but
leave the family financially devastated. ... Who can afford to be sick
in America?"
Snyder, knock on wood, can still afford to be sick, occasionally. It
isn't time to hold a benefit. He isn't going bankrupt, yet.
But as he was leaving the store without his meds, it dawned on him. He
was in the Army Air Force toward the end of World War II.
He made a quick detour to the veterans hospital in Des Moines. A
Veterans Affairs doctor wrote him a prescription. His bill was $8.
Eight dollars!
Either somebody's making a lot of money on blood thinner or they're
losing a lot of money.
One way or the other, something is wrong with this picture. It makes you
wonder. If the government can provide reasonably priced medical care for
veterans, why is it so difficult for Congress to come up with a health
care system for everyone else?
Is it possible we already have a prescription drug system that works?
Snyder, like a PE teacher ordering a student to drop and give him 10
push-ups, told me to look into it.
I reminded him he had plenty of downtime these days and suggested he
look into it himself.
A few minutes later, I felt bad and started doing some research.
The candidates, it turns out, have much to say about health care. I told
Snyder that Barack Obama had a study done comparing Iowa seniors on
Medicare and VA patients. Iowa seniors, he found, pay 71 percent more
for prescriptions drugs.
If Medicare worked like the VA, the junior senator from Illinois has
been telling Iowans, the government's cost would drop by $283 billion
over the next 10 years.
Republicans and other opponents of Obama's plan say the VA doesn't
actually negotiate. They say the law mandates that drug companies sell
to the VA at lower prices, which amounts to price control. And you know
this country's history with price controls.
Opponents also say the veterans program lacks access to 3,000 of the
4,300 meds covered by Medicare. In other words, the VA keeps prices low
by limiting choices.
Maybe so, but don't try telling that to Snyder, who needs to get out on
the hustings, whatever they are, and start listening to what the
candidates have to say about insurance.
Most of the Democrats, by the way, have plans similar to Obama's.
Snyder told me that sounded like a good idea. He'd never been on a
husting before and this seemed like a good time.
Not only that, but he's also starting to feel a little more like his old
self again after getting the runaround.
"I'm almost back to my normal meanness," he said.
Columnist Marc Hansen can be reached at (515) 284-8534 or
mahansen@dmreg.com
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Larry Scott --
