As someone with a lot of prescriptions, I’d be paying a lot of money without insurance, and I wouldn’t be able to pay for necessities such as an asthma inhaler or shots for various conditions. Weight loss medicine without insurance can cost about $500, and it feels like you are subscribing to a month-long subscription to something like “Breath Again Monthly.”
Then there are people with diabetes or mental health issues, and sleep issues, and if you want to fix those problems, it costs an arm and a leg to do it. What’s worse is that some medicines are life or death, asthma attacks happen randomly, anything can trigger them, and low sugar can happen anywhere, and you may not have sweets or something to raise it if it’s too low, or insulin with you if it gets too high.
When it comes to life or death, medicine shouldn’t cost anything. I understand that it takes money to make those medicines, but to prevent a lot of loss because they didn’t have what they needed can save a lot of heartbreak.
Then there are those big, expensive tests that are used to detect things before something worse happens. Without health insurance, if someone needs blood work or something like a pap smear or colonoscopy, it could lead to worse problems, and those are the times when families get angry because such things shouldn’t be impossible to pay for. Unfortunately, if you have a job and bad insurance, you are out of luck, and most people don’t want to be on Medicaid because it makes you feel bad that you can’t afford something else.
Health is extremely important, and if we can’t afford to get ourselves medicines, it could lead to more health issues or even death. When do we stop overcharging for care that will keep us healthy and alive? It could be years before the health industry stops overcharging and cares about the patients rather than money. I vote for keeping us alive longer, and the first step is to lower costs. Hopefully in the future, it will change for the better.
