Good Grief! They Want My Patients To Die!
Yesterday, my friend called and asked if she could come over because she had a case of the blues. The answer was, of course! Four years ago, she suffered from arthritis and asthma. Her primary doctor asked her to see a pulmonary specialist because her arthritis and asthma weren’t responding to the treatments she was giving her. My friend, although she was hesitant, did as she was told. The pulmonary specialist agreed that my friend was unique and sent her for some testing and suggested a few other specialists that could help pinpoint just what was going on with her body. She joked that she already knew what was going on “her body was seventy but she was only fifty”. Underneath it all, I knew that she was frightened beyond belief because my friend relies on Medicaid for her medical care. My friend’s coping skills are fantastic. I truly have never seen anyone deal with chronic illness the way she does. The bottom line is that my friend also suffers from multiple sclerosis, a neurological myopthy, and COPD-all conditions that mimic each other as well as the other two already diagnosed. When she heard the news, she told me that now it might be more than she could handle.
For the past few years, she has been handling it rather well. There have been increased emergency visits because her medications no longer work and/or or her doctors can no longer prescribe the more effective medication because it is no longer on the approved list of drugs put out by Medicaid. She joked last summer that if she didn’t know better she would think that the government wanted her dead so they just didn’t have to pay her medical bills any more. I told her it appeared that way but it was probably more because someone in Columbus was making decisions about what is allowed and what isn’t allowed in a box. When she heard that other states had pilot programs that give recipients a finite amount of money in an account to spend as they see fit on their medical needs, she was hopeful that our state would look for alternative methods too. She said that she wished that she and her doctors could decide which medications to give her rather than having to rely on a preapproved list made with no consideration of her individual needs.
She told me Wednesday that her primary doctor had told her that pain management would become the order of the day that her condition was such that that was where ”we find ourselves”. Her neurologist concurred that this was the best course of action. Both said that emergency room visits would become more frequent. She held out hope for her pulmonary specialist because he has pulled things out of his hat before that have staved off the worst symptoms of her diseases.
But then came Friday. She sat in the examining room waiting for her doctor to return with his magic potions written on a piece a paper that would help her for a bit more time. When she heard raised voices-her doctor and his nurse were comparing his prescriptions to the approved Medicaid drug list. “No! NO! What you mean No! Good Grief! They want my patients to die.” She then heard what appeared to be a box of medications thrown down. It was several minutes before her doctor walked back into the room with a bag of drug company samples in his hand. He told my friend that these samples would see her through for a month. He would write an affidavit to the state to see if the medications he was giving her today could be approved for her, but he wanted her to know that he was finding it more and more difficult to get approval for medications off the list. He also said that the pharmaceutical companies were on to him, and he was not receiving nearly as many samples as he did in the past. But he patted her knee and said together, we will do our best.
Having her doctor exclaim in exasperation what she had feared for years was more than she could handle. I told her that she was entitled to have more than one blue day. I know that she wanted more than that from me, but I couldn’t tell her that things would be okay that we would all get through it because I am having a difficult time myself seeing the light at the end of this dark tunnel we call our “health care crisis”. Many of you criticize my emotional comments and posts about these issues, but I say to all of you if we forget the human faces that live with our “on high” decisions we forget our humanity.
November 14th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
what is your friend’s first name so she can be in my prayers?
November 21st, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Christine is the friend’s name, and she says, “Thanks, I can use all the prayers I can get.” She’s a good egg.