Running to the light

Will those of us so hungry for health care, health insurance reform, be a bug, zapped when we think we reached the light?

I can see the prospect of reform, it is right there, behind Sen. Max Baucus. I know it is there, but I'm not sure what it looks like yet. I know what I want it to looks like. I think I'd like it if if looked like the government health insurance my grandparents have, medicare. I think I'd like it if it looks like medicare with a prescription drug benefit that has no donut hole -- I'd happily double my medicare taxes for it to cover me and my family too; I think my employer would too, probably.

But are we getting blinded by the light of reform?

I am concerned that sick people like me, will get a health insurance public option -- a public option that is a group of other sick people, crowded separately by ourselves without healthy people to optimally spread risk. Yeah, we can celebrate that we can finally buy health insurance, but will it be ridiculously expensive and ridiculously inadequate with big co-pays and coverage holes (especially if our government doesn't subsidize it, as our President promises)?

I am concerned that reform will not help bring new medicines to sick people like me, as quickly as we need, as is possible -- sure there will now be a pathway route for FDA approval of generic biological drugs, like for the medicine I use (that now costs $2840 per month, up from $960 per month during 2002). My Congresswoman, whom I like, seems to have successfully scored 12 years of "exclusivity" for biological drug makers. This is a multi-billion dollar gift to an industry that spends more money advertising than on research for cures -- and in our country, we've socialized (yes, socialism) risk developing new drugs because so much of the cost to develop new medicine is bourne by public research universities and public funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). If you are a corporate officer at a drug making company or maybe if you own stock in drug makers, congratulations. As a patient, I can expect drug companies to maximize shareholder value and to withhold or retard development of new, potentially more inexpensive or more effective medicines to heal sick people like me if it means competition with drugs they already market (no competing with themselves).

If you need 16 ounces of water to drink and the person holding the gallon water bottle hands you a 4 ounce glass filled with water, what do you do?

I will call my Senators to ask them to support health care reform. Ask them to support the kind of reform sick people like me need, the kind of reform healthy people who aren't sick yet need. You should call your members of Congress too!