RTS -Mental health

Affordable?

It’s critical that we lower the cost of prescription drugs and develop a health care plan that works for all Americans. Mike Braun

I am Canadian, but this could be applied to Canada.

I am not really sure when I started noticing the price of everything. Debating with a company over the cost of their services. Look through all of the flyers to see which store has the best prices. Is it something that happens when you grow older, I don’t remember noticing the prices of everything before buying.

The bill for the repair made on my furnace arrived in the mail. Glad that they will let me make payments. Then over the past couple of weeks I have been having a change with my pain killers and something to help me sleep better. I had to call my doctor and explain that I couldn’t afford the medications. I had to ask him to once again change my medications.

If a person cannot afford something, something like their medications, it could sit on the lowest shelf in the store, but, it would still be inaccessible. I am on assistance from the Provincial Government. I called my pharmacy that I deal with and asked if there were any exemptions available, the reply was, “no”. So, I asked about generic brands, turns out I have the generics. These medications have to be renewed every seven days. For a month of the prescriptions would cost me just under three hundred dollars.

My thoughts have been wandering all over the gambit. Thoughts about what I could change to afford the medications. Thinking about the prices doesn’t inspire a person to write!

I have read many reports about innocent people were given Oxycodone after surgery. They become addicted to the medication, a medication they cannot afford to keep on taking. So they turn to the streets, heroin for it gives the same euphoric high, but the cost is much cheaper.

I read a report about overdoses and how pharmacies are teaching people how to use naloxone, if they have people around them that use needles. The number of overdoses in a day is climbing and the stuff on the street is deadly. You are playing roulette with the stuff.

So, dear reader, this old guy has been wondering what the fix is, a fix to the cost of medications so that they are affordable!

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Comments (

11

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  1. ashleyleia

    I really hope Canada will develop a national pharmacare plan sooner rather than later. If people can’t access medications, it just ends up costing the healthcare system more in the end.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  2. ShiraDest

    Thank you for this article, and you are absolutely correct: it is crucial that we find a way, preferably via a single payer healthcare system, to make all meds affordable for all people.
    Best regards,
    -Shira

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    1. rts – Facing the Challenges of Mental Health

      Thank you Shira! I am not sure the way or the how’s to accomplish the task.
      Thank you for your input and you are always welcomed here!

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
      1. ShiraDest

        Thank you, RTS: I’m not sure either, only that I am trying to grow as a person in compassion, empathy, and understanding, while I do my part as a responsible citizen (even though we don’t have full health care, I still take care of myself as best I can to limit my ownself as a burden on society) and help others to have their needs filled and to contribute. I think every idea is needed, and every willing hand is a help in making lighter the task (or at least I hope so: I love how the Quakers, I think?, say that many hands makes light the burden…). Sorry to ramble on,
        Stay Safe,
        -Shira

        Liked by 2 people

  3. Colorful Sisters

    This post is great! Keep up the good work!

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    1. rts – Facing the Challenges of Mental Health

      Thank you for your encouragement!

      Like

      Reply
  4. fgsjr2015

    Soon after the new Canadian government promised universal medication (though likely generic brand only) coverage — which would negatively affect the industry’s plentiful profits — the drug companies reacted with threats of abandoning their Canada-based R&D if the federal government goes ahead with its plan.
    Apparently universal medication coverage is now yet another indefinite no-go, as it has been with past Liberal governments’ promises to initiate one.

    R&D costs are typically cited by the profitable industry to justify its exorbitant prices and resistance to universal medication coverage.

    Yet, according to a Huffington Post story (“Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research: Report,” updated May 8, 2013), a study conducted by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that for every $19 dollars the pharmaceutical industry spent on promoting and marketing new drugs, it put only $1 into its R&D.

    More recently, an Angus Reid study found that about 90 percent of Canadians — including three quarters of Conservative Party supporters specifically — champion universal medication coverage. Another 77 percent believed this should be a high-priority matter for the federal government.

    The same study found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost one-quarter (23%) of respondents decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed.

    Not only is medication less affordable, but many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system thus costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication was covered.

    Considering it is such a serious health affair for so many people, impressed upon me is the industry lobbyists’ potent influence on our top-level elected officials for the sake of profit-margin interests.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. rts – Facing the Challenges of Mental Health

      Thank you so much for your input and some great information! Your comment would make an excellent post. If you do so, let me know so that I can read the post.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
      1. fgsjr2015

        Thank you, but I’m not sure what you mean: Where would it make an excellent post?

        Liked by 1 person

      2. rts – Facing the Challenges of Mental Health

        I feel you could write an excellent post including your comment. Your comment is well written and also very informative.
        I apologize if I didn’t come across with my thoughts. Sometimes my brain goes faster than my fingers. 🙂

        Liked by 1 person

      3. fgsjr2015

        Thank you. What I wrote in that post is basically the meat-and-potatoes of what I know and understand about that industry’s formidable lobbyist influence.

        However, I could relevantly add that, generally, both American and Canadian governances commonly maintain thinly veiled yet firm ties to large corporations; it’s as though elected heads are meant to represent big money interests over those of the working citizenry and poor. (I believe it is basically why those powerful $$$ interests generally resist proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which tends to dilute the corporate lobbyist influence on the former.)

        Accordingly, major political decisions will normally foremost reflect what is in big business’s best interests. And don’t expect to hear this fact readily reported by the mainstream news-media, which is concentratedly corporate owned.

        The language that corporate CEOs understand best is, undoubtedly, one of increased consumerism, economic stimulation and profit-margin growth. The usual tradeoff, of course, is their destruction and max-exploitation of laborers, resources, and natural environment.

        Those doubting the powerful persuasion of huge business interests need to consider how high-level elected governing officials can become crippled by implicit or explicit corporate threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, all of which is being made even worse by a blaring news-media naturally critical of incumbent governments. (For example, the industry’s apparently successful threat to abandon their Canada-based R&D if the federal government went ahead with its universal medication coverage.)

        Also concerning is that corporate representatives actually write bills for our governing representatives to vote for and have implemented, typically word for word, supposedly to save the elected officials their time.

        Liked by 1 person

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