I Don’t Hate America!

You’re suffering from chest pain. You know you don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to get it checked out. It’s difficult to tell if the pain is severe enough to visit the ED or if it will go away on its own. Your wife forces you to go to the ED, worried that you might be having a heart attack. Reluctantly, you get a ride from her and go to the hospital. As soon as you get there, you’re hooked up to monitors, given a couple meds, and talking treatment options with the healthcare team. They decide you must go in for an angiogram, a common procedure done to see if any coronary vessels are occluded. Throughout the entire event, you keep thinking, “do we have to?” They rush you into the cath lab knowing there’s not much time before your heart will lose all circulation. They found you were having a heart attack and a vessel is 100% occluded. The MD, much like an artist creating their masterpiece, inserts a catheter through your femoral artery to access your heart, and swiftly inserts a stent in the occluded vessel. The team sighs in relief that they were able to prevent more damage from happening. Further tests will confirm the extent of the damage, but for now, you survived. Thank God. Oh wait, you don’t have health insurance.

I tell this real-life story because of an experience I had this week with a patient. He was your typical middle-aged family man holding two jobs. His concern interested me since… what DO you do? How do you tell someone that we saved their life while at the same time, handing them an invoice? With the stent he received, he needs to be on a medication called Plavix. This drug is extremely important to take daily for two years. Numerous studies have shown that not taking Plavix after insertion of a drug eluting stent (DES) can result in an increased risk for heart attack, stroke, re-stenosis, and death. The typical cost for Plavix is ~$4 a day. $4 A DAY! That equates to roughly $1,460 a year, or $2,920 for the total two years he NEEDS to be on it. In his case, that is approximately 10% of his yearly income that needs to be spent to literally stay alive.

A generic equivalent of clopidogrel bisulfate (Plavix) has been created, but Bristol-Myers Squibb has been fighting legal battles to make sure their name-brand drug is the only one available to patients. From AARP:

In the case of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Plavix, an antiplatelet, what began as a dispute with the generic manufacturer over patent infringement has become a proposed settlement that will keep the generic version off the market until 2011. Plavix racked up huge sales in 2005—$3.8 billion in the U.S. alone, with worldwide sales of nearly $6 billion.

Thankfully, many of us have health insurance to cover these costs. Just think though, how many patients like mine have been paying 10% of their annual income on the drug Plavix for Bristol-Myers Squibb to rack up $6 billion?

At my hospital, a social worker and financial advisor will work with patients in situations like these. However, I strongly believe in a healthcare system that will allow anyone that needs life-saving drugs such as Plavix to get them at little to no-cost. I am hoping that when Tim Walz is re-elected and Steve Sarvi kicks John Kline out, they will continue believing in the mission of universal healthcare. I am predicting that in 2008, there will be a DFL controlled Senate, House, and President. If so, we will see dramatic changes in our healthcare system.

Maybe if the above story happens to you, there will be no need to ask, “do we have to?”

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I am starting my Master’s program at the end of the month. My plan is to receive my Master’s in Science of Nursing (M.S.N) with an education focus. Eventually, I would like to be a professor at a local community college. If anyone has some connections with a college that needs adjunct nursing professors, please forward any information along.

Also, continuing with my belief that everyone should have access to free healthcare, I just accepted a position at Planned Parenthood as a volunteer clinic nurse. If you are looking at donating to a great organization, look no further than Planned Parenthood. Here’s a link to their donation page.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Steve Sarvi, Congress, John Kline, Tim Walz, Nursing, 2008, Healthcare, Jason B.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.