Cancer MD: "Insurance co's. are evil, they want my patients to die"
Sat Apr 08, 2006 at 11:09:45 AM PDT
I have a friend, he is an oncologist. Oncologists treat people with cancer.
With each passing day, he is having more trouble getting insurance companies to pay for the medications he wants his patients to take. When he is not treating his patients, he is fighting with insurance companies.
Remember how it used to be? Remember when doctors made medical decisions? Not any more, dear friends.
I will be writing more about this doctor in the coming months, he has plenty he wants to tell me.
I was not surprised then, to see the latest horror story, Drug Plan's Side Effect Is Severe about Medicare D in the New York Times this morning.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
You should not be surprised either.
You should be outraged though. You see, America is the richest country on the planet.
But, be very clear about one thing: it was never the intention of Medicare D to help America's elderly. In a scathing essay in TruthOut, Robert Hayes explains why Medicare D is a failure--a program which will never work.
Picture this movie: It's 2003 in the wealthiest nation in the world and millions of Americans are suffering needlessly and dying prematurely because they cannot afford medicine.
Employers have hiked up the cost of their retiree drug coverage and pharmaceutical companies have continued to drive up the prices of life-saving prescription drugs.
Congress and the president know they must act or risk being run out of office. There is near-universal support to add prescription drug coverage to the nation's treasured Medicare program.
So, two of the nation's most powerful economic interests, the drug and insurance industries, are invited up to Capitol Hill to collude with leaders of Congress to develop a prescription drug benefit - one that serves their interests.
Remember the shameful and thoroughly corrupt Medicare D legislation was passed under cover of darkness in the dead of night.
With no public oversight and with the press milling outside locked doors, the congressional junta drafts legislation locked arm in arm with the puppeteers that control the federal government.
In a back room, they design a drug "benefit" that allows the pharmaceutical companies to further inflate the price of medications and reap billions of dollars in windfall profits. They promise tens of billions more in profits to health insurers to deliver this coverage.
But there is a human cost - this $700 billion package is leaving millions of older and disabled Americans worse off and millions more of them still without drug coverage.
Now let's take a look at what the New York Times is reporting. How is all this corruption harming American citizens.
As a result of the new Medicare drug program, thousands of people who take pills to fight cancer have suddenly found themselves with new bills to pay for their essential medicines. Frances Blue is one of them.
Frances Blue, who has lung cancer, says she is without medicine because she cannot afford the new Medicare deductible.
Ms. Blue, a retired teacher, learned five years ago that she had lung cancer. In December, her doctor decided that her old medicine was not working and that her best bet would be the cancer drug Tarceva, a medication from Genentech that costs about $3,000 a month.
A few weeks later, on Jan. 1, the new Medicare Part D program, which is supposed to help provide prescription drug coverage for people like Ms. Blue, went into effect.
So, what happened to Ms. Blue? You say this legislation is benefiting who--American citizens or the pharmaceutical and insurance industries?
Ms. Blue says she cannot afford the $3,600 in annual co-payments that are required before her Part D insurance fully kicks in. And her income from her teacher's pension and Social Security disability payments, about $4,000 a month, is too high to qualify for charitable programs that help patients with drug co-payments.
Remember the famous "donut hole"?
But now that the oral cancer drugs are covered by Part D, they are bound by rules requiring Medicare enrollees to pay $3,600 in out-of-pocket costs each year.
Here's how Robert Hayes describes the reality for people like Ms. Blue and millions of Americans.
16 million Americans with Medicare-men and women age 65 and older and people with severe, long-term disabilities-still have no drug coverage. Just 7 million Americans who were uninsured before the drug program was launched are newly insured. Six million of the poorest and frailest Americans who lost Medicaid coverage on January 1 now have inferior, less-reliable drug coverage. And the anger and dissatisfaction of people who are enrolled in drug plans increases each day as they discover how inadequate and unreliable the benefit is.
Coverage gaps, excessive out-of-pocket costs and routine denials of coverage for needed drugs are commonplace. Even enrollment in a private drug plan frequently leaves older Americans going without the medicines they need.
http://www.truthout.org/...
The same crooks who gave us Iraq, gave us Medicare D.
Nothing but lies. Nothing but deceit. Nothing but corruption.
