People can only afford exjade if they have health insurance, and insurance is quite expensive, although many people get it as a work benefit from their employers...a benefit many employers are finding hard to maintain. Many employers require co-payments by the employees and these co-payments are rising. I just received notice that my health plan costs will rise about 13% at the beginning of the year. I will be paying over $800 for my family plan and more than $300 for my employee's single person plan, monthly. Meanwhile, the insurers are cutting back on approval for scans such as x-rays, MRI's and CT-scans.
How can I afford this? I can't afford to not have it is the answer. Medical care in the US is so exorbitantly costly that if you need any medical attention requiring a hospital stay, that your bill is quickly in the thousands of dollars. One chemo treatment for cancer can cost from $4000-$8000. A simple visit to a doctor's office is easily $65. A blood transfusion will run somewhere around $1000. A thal patient could not survive without insurance in he west. When Mia and Sally put together an estimate of what one year's health costs for a thal would be in Australia, to be used in the court case of our member Akkro13 to help him keep his son in New Zealand where he can get proper care for his thal, the cost approached $100,000 Australian per year. Health costs are out of control and much of the cost is being driven by the high price of prescription drugs. As much as I pay for health insurance, I would not be able to afford health care without it. The payments my insurer pays for the various prescription drugs that my family members use in one month is almost as much as the cost of my policy for one month. On top of that they have paid tens of thousands of dollars in hospitalization costs for myself and members of my family over the years.
Controlling drug costs would be a big step in controlling health care costs but nothing is done. The large pharmaceutical companies are the biggest donors to national political campaigns and the politicians keep a hands-off attitude towards those outrageous profits being made by the pharma companies. Some sort of national health insurance is a part of the platform for most democrat candidates for president, but few will criticize the drug companies. Meanwhile, large amounts of money are spent by these companies on advertising to a national audience. While the companies cry about the cost of research, millions are spent to advertise their products, pushing drugs on consumers who have no real idea of what the drug is or why they need it. We are treated to ads that show drugs producing some idyllic settings for our lives...blue skies, butterflies and song birds...all from the latest drug.
If the system in the US doesn't change soon, the double digit percentage increases in health insurance costs will force all but the wealthy to accept far less than adequate health care. But our government constantly tells us that it is impossible and also socialistic to provide health care for our citizens. Yes, this is the same government that will spend trillions of dollars waging war against Iraq in an attempt to keep the Mideast unstable so that we may continue to exploit their oil perpetually. Those trillions could solve every problem we have but the government prefers to keep people in fear of bogeymen...this decade's bogeyman being terrorists as opposed to the communist bogeyman of previous decades. 911 played right into the hands of these corrupt leaders, providing the fear necessary to get Americans to approve any military adventuring and restrictions of our rights that they sought. And nothing will change until the people of this country wake up and see that they have been constantly manipulated since World War II. In spite of the fact that the US military budget is higher than the military budgets of every country in the world combined, people in the US still live in fear that some bogeyman will invade and force us into submission. There is no country on earth that can approach the military might of the US, yet people live in fear of being subjugated by outside forces. Meanwhile we have allowed ourselves to be subjugated by our own corrupt leaders, with the ample help of the corporate media that paints these scary bogeyman-filled pictures for us daily.
Only when we embrace the world as our friends, rather than our enemy, will things ever change and only then will our resources be intelligently and fairly directed. The money the US spends on waging endless wars could solve almost every problem known to mankind, including of course, a cure for thal and so many other diseases. Will we ever wake up and reject the fear-mongering of the politicians and the corporate media? I am skeptical, as I see daily how easily Americans are manipulated on issue after issue, the latest of these being illegal immigrants. Migrant workers are one of the new bogeymen to the average US citizen, even those those same workers are needed to put food on our tables. We treat them like dirt and now call them threats to our national security. I am sorry, but the Mexican family picking apples or milking cows is NOT a threat to me or anyone else and I wish some politicians would have the guts to stand up and say that!
I hope this doesn't offend too many people but if it does, perhaps you should re-examine your own beliefs and see if they are founded in fact or fear. I have been asked recently if I ever speak out politically in my passion to help thals. Well, I have in the past used this venue to appeal to people to vote with their heads and not out of fear and I will continue to do so. Nothing will ever change unless we demand better than the corporate puppets that are our government. And this applies everywhere. I see the governments in India and Pakistan that manipulate the thinking of their citizens in order to maintain power and I see the same things happening. In India, the economy is rapidly expanding with little regard to the effect on the environment and the quality of air and water in India, and almost no attempt to share this economic expansion with the millions of people living in utter poverty. In Pakistan a corrupt military leader parades himself as the president while setting a stage that will make fair elections impossible. In both countries, hatred of each other's religion is constantly fanned by opportunistic politicians. Even in the Maldives, a president has become so obsessed with maintaining power that he has become nothing more than a parody of himself. Meanwhile, the care for the hundreds of thal majors in Maldives is weak and getting weaker.
I appeal to all to find the inner strength to rise above the fear-mongering of the politicians and embrace all people as brothers and sisters. I have been to several countries, including two Muslim countries where my own family believed I would be in danger, and have found nothing but people who are no different from myself. We are all one earthly family and until we act like it we will suffer at the hands of leaders who will never have our best interests on their minds. I apologize if I have strayed from the topic but the underlying causes of the high prices of drugs and health care reveal why we live in a world why the price of Exjade is determined by the perceived value of one's own life rather than on the cost of producing the drug. The profits of the corporations come before the needs of the people and this will continue to be the case until we change things ourselves.