My wife's native Romania recently joined the European Union, and we went last week for a family visit. This is a good time of year to fly to Europe, with tickets across the pond easily available for less than $500. But we flew for free, thanks to the 15 year Republican filibuster on healthcare and the associated health industry war on women and family planning.
How to fly to Europe free! after the break...
It's no secret that Americans are travelling in droves to Canada for prescription meds, and to Mexico for dental care. But there's not much to do or see on a day-trip to Canada, and Mexican border towns will leave you worried about the quality of medical care you'll receive and even more worried about the safety of any medications you buy there. What if you could have the peace-of-mind of a visit to Canada, pay the costs of a visit to Mexico, and get a trip to Europe in the process?
We arrived in Bucharest at midnight, and at 9:30 in the morning we were at the dentist's office. The dentist was extremely nice, spoke enough English for us to communicate, and had modern equipment. She cleaned our teeth, filled our cavities, and had us back on the street for less than $100 - total, for 2 people. One ticket to Romania, basically paid for already.
The other ticket was paid for in birth control pills. My wife's pills used to cost $4 per month through university insurance, but that program mysteriously came to an end. In fact, a great many insurance companies seem to be dropping family planning from their covered services. Why? Is this a sop to the religious right? Has it really gotten more expensive for them to cover birth control than to pay the costs of a pregnancy? Have a variety of corporate dickheads figured out that women will buy their pills regardless of whether they are reimbursed, the way people will still fly even if there is no olive in their salad, and therefore dropped birth control coverage to save a few bucks the way American Airlines red-pencilled their olives (before they eliminated food service altogether...)? Has the feminist movement evaporated to the point that corporations no longer have anything to fear from outrageous assaults on a woman's reproductive decisions? Whatever the reason, my wife's pills were costing us $40 per month in the US.
How much were they in Romania? About $2 per month. The medicine is top quality, from repuatable European manufacturers, sold over-the-counter in pristine pharmacies. All we needed to do was bring my wife's American pills to the pharmacy so that we could match the medications. A year's worth of pills that would have cost $480 in the US cost us $24 in Romania. Ka-ching!
We could gotten birth control for even less had we flown to Africa, where governments beg women to practice family planning and European agencies provide pills for free to anyone who wants them. But the pills that are easily available in Africa are the ones that exactly match my wife's old prescription - and she's since switched to a new libido-friendly prescription that changes doses week by week, which I haven't seen south of the Sahara. And I'm not so confident of the dental care available in the parts of Africa where I often work (for starters, I wouldn't want to be in the chair during a power outage, which happens about once an hour in cities like Dar es Salaam), and the ticket from the US is more than twice the price of airfare to Europe. So, while I would heartily recommend that any woman who happens to be in Africa make a point of stocking up on birth control pills if she can find her prescription, thereby taking a big chunk out of the cost of her ticket, you couldn't buy enough pills to bring your trip's cost down to zero.
To Europe, however, you can fly for free. Absurd as it is, you can go to Romania, get the same quality of care and medicines you would find in the States, and be out of pocket the exact same amount of money. Until we elect a president and a congress that will work to finally introduce a national single payer system and a sensible prescription drug plan for everyone, my wife and I will be getting much of our health care courtesy of Orbitz.