The Missing Face of the Uninsured
On this
last day of January, 2008, I was tasked with the pickup up a prescription for a
dear old friend. It could not have come at a worse time. I was struggling to
meet a timetable to catch an airplane out of town.
I stood at the “prescription pickup” station at the pharmacy and I waited and I
waited. When I inquired, “what is the problem”, it was revealed that the
pharmacy computer was having difficulty chit chatting with the health insurance
computer and approving partial payment for the medications prescribed. Finally,
I asked if I could pay cash for the medication and let the computers fight it
out in the days to come. Well, nothing speeds up a transaction like cash. The
bill for thirty pills was $159.95. I was a little surprised at the price and
asked the pharmacy technician if she ever had patients show up with a
prescription without insurance and when faced with the price, turned down the
medication. She looked at me straight into my eyes and said, “Mr. Jennings,
every morning, every afternoon and every evening.”
Upon further questioning she shared with me that patients routinely turned down
insulin to battle diabetes, diuretics to fight congestive heart failure and
routine medications to control high blood pressure, to name a few. Of 300
million U.S. citizens, nearly 50 million have no health insurance. One in six
Americans face choices the majority of us find unthinkable. Who are these
people?
We provide Universal coverage for streets and highways. All 300 millions
Americans have access to our road system. It is considered a public utility.
Even if you do not have an automobile, you can walk along the highways and
byways of America. We have chosen as a society not to refer to this reality as
socialized highways. Our society views highways as a service that all citizens
should have made available to them and road construction companies compete for
the business and are paid to build and re-build these highways for our
individual and collective benefit 
Would it not make sense for America and Americans to find a way to pay pharmaceutical
companies to provide medications that promote life, health and improve the
quality of life for all of our citizens? For American business, would this not
improve productivity, reduce lost work days and serve the interests of business
and industry. There is someone out there in cyberspace that will read this and
accuse me of being in favor of socialized medicine, a new expletive in our
lexicon.
Rotary International provided universal access to polio vaccine to every person
in the world. They raised the money on their own and developed a distribution
system for polio vaccine to essentially eradicate polio throughout the world.
If you have ever attended a Rotary meeting, you would not come away from the
experience thinking of these men and women as wide eyed flaming liberals or
socialists. They saw an opportunity to improve public health throughout the
world and filled a long standing international leadership void.
Where will the leadership come from to provide healthcare to our citizens as a
public utility? I have no interest in socialized medicine. I am not even
certain what that term means. It strikes me that our friends throughout Western
Europe have found numerous models to finance medical care in ways that are
universal and at the same time extraordinarily private. This subject frequently
causes people to start yammering about the Canadian Healthcare System. I can
honestly say that in almost forty years of service to the American healthcare
delivery system I have never met one person advocate that America follow the
lead of Canada in anything but hockey.
My guess is that the leadership will emerge to bring common sense to this
issue. It is not American for many of our best citizens to be embarrassed in
American pharmacies; to shrink away in embarrassment because they cannot afford
a simple medication to enrich or extend their lives.
Jan Ricks Jennings, MHA, LFACHE
Senior Consultant
Senior Management Resources, LLC
412.913.0636 Cell
724.733.0509 Office
JanJenningsBlog.Blogspot.com
Updated March 14, 2023
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