TEAM OBAMA hits hard on Medicare.
“It’s a promise that was made long ago: you work hard, pay in, your Medicare benefits are guaranteed. But Mitt Romney would break that promise. Replace your benefits with a voucher. Insurance companies could just keep raising rates. Instead of a guarantee, seniors could pay $6,400 more a year. AARP says the plan Mitt Romney supports undermines Medicare. Mitt Romney: an end to the Medicare promise.” [text of video above]
Mitt Romney’s weekly podcast focuses on “heartbreaking problem of joblessness.”
“Insurance companies could just keep raising rates. ”
Oh right. That applies to Obama’s big “health care reform” package as well. Not much room to talk there.
I have insurance and I’m one of the lucky ones, however, I have a couple of things medically to deal with since 1998. One of these conditions required one of my docs to perscribe a med that I found out two days ago my regular pharmacy, Rite Aid, could not handle.
How this all came about. I received a phone call from Rite Aid informing me that my Health Insurance Co. called them and approved the script from my doc but that Rite Aid couldn’t provide the meds. Rite Aid told me that I had to speak with my insurance company to ascertain where I had to go to get what I needed.
I called my health insurers and was told that I had to go through a specialized “pharmacy” that handled this script. This particular prescription had to be handled by a specialized pharmacy called “Bio Script”.
During all of this, I asked why this particular medicine couldn’t be filled by Rite Aid and was told that this med is so expensive that my insurance company required that only one specialized pharmacy could fill that script. When I inquired from Rite Aid how much this script cost (a one month supply), I was told to my shock that it cost $10,000. That’s 30 pills! That’s about $334 for one pill!
Who the hell can afford this except those whose yearly intake qualifies them for the 1%. I have to pay a co-pay for this med and it’s not inexpensive but if I didn’t have insurance I would be screwed like so many other people without insurance in our country who need these meds to try to prevent a worse case scenario. If I had no insurance, I wouldn’t be covered under my partner’s insurance because her company, right now, doesn’t cover the spouses of same sex couples. So, I would have been up a creek. I take several meds and this one med would total $120,000 a year. No working class, middle class or even upper class income family could afford this and this is just one pill.
This is where the ACA is a fair start but it falls far short of where we all need to be to receive decent health care in this country. Obama’s compromise with Big Pharma wherein he told them if they came aboard and supported his (Republican think tank “the Heritage Foundation”) bill, he would forego price negotiations. http://tinyurl.com/noozem So, even if this happens in 2014 when the full force of the ACA kicks in, this huge problem is still huge. This is exactly what critics of ACA mean when they say that the ACA is not health care reform, it’s health insurance reform because of the issues I encountered with this prescription.
For those who have no insurance, it will clearly be worse under a Romney/Ryan administration. But, unless and until we have a truly universal health care system wherein it’s a one stop shop like medicare and everyone is covered under this half-century well-run government medical program, people are going to die every year due to the selfish, greedy middle “man” health insurance companies, the non-negotiable deals the government stikes with Big Pharma and the sometimes greedy doctors who won’t even accept Medicare.