Here is a govt response to denying a new life saving medication to a 14 year old gal, with cystic fibrosis.
“Cost alone was not the determining factor, but how we will pay
for it is something we must consider in advance as we are a state
agency with limited funds.”
Yes, the treatment is expensive -$300k expensive – but it’s nothing compared to what Arkansas taxpayers
will be paying to provide free medical coverage to non-disabled adults through its private option Medicaid expansion plan.
The state will spend over
$1 billion this year alone to cover healthy, childless adults, and at the same time deny Chloe her treatment.
“They just don’t want to pay for it,” Chloe said during an interview in
Little Rock, where she travels for treatment from her home in Walnut
Ridge, Ark. “I feel like they don’t care about what’s wrong with me,
that I’m not as important as everybody else.”….
“In an email to colleagues discussing a review board’s
deliberations about Kalydeco, a pharmacist named Pamela Ford wrote, “the
consensus of the physicians on the board was that none of the
prescribers would have a clue that this will cost AR Medicaid $303,408
per patient per year.”
Medicaid
patients in Arizona died after
the state stopped covering life-saving organ transplants, and
developmentally-disabled Medicaid patients in Maine languished on
waitlists for critical services, all to cut costs and continue funding
their prior Medicaid expansions. Instead of a safety net, ObamaCare’s
expansion turns Medicaid into a tightrope and its the truly needy
patients who are pushed off first.
In fact as some of you may know, Maine had to refuse the
Medicaid expansion because having just paid Medicaid (Maine Care) past
due bills (YEARS PAST DUE) to the tune of more than half a billion $,
very few wanted to take a chance on the expansion, because we just can’t
afford it. I was in a position to see hospitals unable to pay
suppliers, and see services to hospitals CUT OFF.
That’s how a poor national plan is going to play out. Funds too
short, or companies too strained to keep up payments to hospitals will
result in suppliers, inventors, and engineering companies shutting off
hospitals at the first level of effects. Insurers, will bill the govt
for the losses which will pay slowly (my research company in GOOD TIMES,
averaged 150 days ageing on bills). And then the insurers to stay alive
will be lobbying the govt for more restrictive admissions, pay outs,
stays, and Rx’s.
Nobody will be to blame and people like Chloe are out.
This is why the plan has to be practical. Obamacare and it’s
corollary expansions are NOT. Any system as we have now where the govt
itself selects ‘who shall live and who shall die’ in some insulated,
committee ‘softened’, conscience muffled manner is CRUEL AND UNUSUAL
PUNISHMENT based on a DNA dice roll THEY INVENTED.