I am relatively young but in final stage renal failure. I have a higher chance of survival IF I can recieve proper medical care AND LIVING ASSISTANCE in a different state. Get me OUT of Mississippi.
The long post w the good explanation is being shared but not inspiring much help. So, I simplified it.
My illness is straight up fatal. Not gonna beat around thatBush, anymore. I seem desperate for help because I AM desperate for help.
My nephrologist has seen enough improvement in my kidney function, lately, to believe someone my age (early 30s) might have a longer life WITH PROPER AND FREQUENT MEDICAL ATTENTION. Sadly, that just isn’t an option where I live.
Please, if you can help me with moving expenses (even just a couple of bucks) I would be grateful. I’m sinking fast in Mississippi and now my doctors are giving me too much hope to ignore. I wanna get out of this situation and I’m working my fatigued, brain-foggy ass off to make it out of here.
If I can undo the damage my heart failure caused to the rest of my body, I want to. I don’t want to spend another month KNOWING what I should be eating, what medicines I should be taking, what tests and treatments I should be getting… and receiving almost none of it because Mississippi lawmakers think people like me have somehow earned slow, painful deaths.
Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…
This….
This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.
And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:
Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.
I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.
It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.
The rest of the world is not like this.
Eat the rich. Resist.
I’m still boggled by how incredibly expensive utterly ridiculous procedures are: an ultrasound; an x-ray. Sure, the machinery is expensive.
But given the base model for an x-ray machine in Germany costs about 40,000 EUR, and one (1) x-ray in the United States costs 4,000 USD without insurance, something is Very Wrong here in the US. Amortization is a thing…but not in ten (10) or so uses, as a general rule.
Ultrasound examinations here in the US are almost impossible to obtain, and likewise costs a lot of money. In Germany, many doctors have them in their practices, right there. They cost about 2,500 EUR for base models in black and white, and from 9,000 EUR for the fancy ones on rollers with nice screens and several functionalities. They save lives, too, like my sister’s – whose ruptured appendix was diagnosed just in time. How they are Mystical Equipment at Special Clinics that you need to be Sent To For Only The Worst Cases is a travesty.
The US is in the middle of a particularly bad flu outbreak and people are dying because they can’t afford medicine, or because they are making horrible choices between like that between medicine and other basic needs.
This breaks my heart literally every day, because I see so many customers have to make this choice. Sometimes they can afford it for the person in the family that is actually sick right now, but can’t buy it for the rest of the family (or at least those most at risk of catching it from their loved one), and then someone else catches it, and it’s just a vicious cycle. Especially since there’s multiple strains going around, so overcoming one bout of flu (or having the flu shot) doesn’t mean 100% immunity to catching another strain of it.
Over here in PA/NJ the generic $106.99 cash, but a lot of people haven’t met their yearly deductibles yet, so the insurance companies
(the absolute filth)
cover NOTHING. NADA. ZIP. Not even a measly 5%.
SO!!! Here’s what to do:
If you are prescribed Tamiflu or it’s generic, Oseltamivir, ask your doctor if they have a coupon for it, or immediately go online/on your phone and look up a coupon on google. Usually GoodRx or scriptsave have decent coupons.
(Between $40-$80 is what I normally see for coupon prices, much better than $100-$250). There’s also familywize, wish foundation, blink (who don’t work with CVS btw), or even your state’s drug discount card.
Make sure it’s for the form and strength of the drug you were prescribed (capsules or liquid, usually. 30/45/60/75mg) and for the pharmacy you’re going to. GoodRX has different prices for CVS vs Walgreens vs Costco, etc. You may need to check with the pharmacy if they have it in stock, because there’s a huge shortage since the manufacturers didn’t anticipate such high demand. Adjust the brand/generic and which chain on the coupon accordingly.
Activate them if they need activating – usually an email or a quick call, sometimes an app download. Read any fine print and check that the coupon is not expired.
Take a screenshot, or print it out. Barring that, write down all the codes exactly as they appear, including how they’re labelled. (Pharmacies always need BINs and IDs, but if there’s PCNs, [rx]Group numbers, Person Codes, etc, they’ll need everything on the card to be able to bill correctly. It’s better to have the actual card/email/screenshot.)
When you get to the pharmacy, check how much your prescription is. If it’s more than the coupon (again, usually $40-80, but sometimes less), ask politely!!!*** for them to rebill the drug with this coupon, and wait patiently as they do so (depending on how busy they are and how busy the servers are for the company they’re submitting the info to, it may take a few minutes.) Understand that whatever amount is billed to the coupon is not being contributed towards paying your deductible, but hopefully you won’t have to worry about that much over the year.
Success. Please feel better soon.
***Please, please, please be polite. Please do not yell or have your parent/spouse/sibling/child/friend/nurse/neighbor/nanny/errand boy yell at the pharmacists/technicians/front store employees/customers in front or behind you/hapless passerby
about the price or availability or how much insurance is a racket. Please understand that the workers have absolutely no control of how much ANY drug costs initially, nor how much your insurance asks for as a copay, nor how helpful the coupons turn out to be in regards to your own financial situation. Even their control over availability is tenuous at best, because of aforementioned manufacturer backlog, high demand, and strict ordering systems. If they need to call around to find it for you, let them call around. If they need a few minutes to get the information processed, give them a few minutes. Please treat your fellow humans with respect, even when you understandably feel like shit and they are limited in what they can do for you.
GoodRX is an absolute saving grace. It brought my ADD meds down from $274 to $125. It helps with almost every med if you pay out of pocket. Sign up, download the app, follow the instructions. Be well, y’all. 💜
As a former pharmacy tech I promise you if you are polite and there isn’t a line 7 people deep a good tech will move heaven and earth to get you what you need and find you a coupon. For a while I had three different discount cards memorized. Sometimes they would only take off $5 sometimes it would make the medicine half price but I was willing to try.
PSA: COUGH MEDICINE + SSRI ANTIDEPRESSANTS CAN KILL YOU.
I am apparently very very lucky that I had a low dose of both. Google tells me that what I had on Saturday was serotonin syndrome and it can apparently kill you.
The culprit is dextromethorphan, which is a cough suppressant and is probably in most cold medicines.
Feel free to reblog this because my psychiatrist didn’t warn me and the label on the cough medicine had nothing about this.
if you’re ever worried about possible drug interactions with otc medications/alcohol you can always use https://www.drugs.com/drug_interactions.html this site if you cant get ahold of your doctor
BYYYYE with my asthma I practically live on cough medicines!!!! And I NEVER knew.
Over
the last two months my health has deteriorated rapidly. I went from
having severe migraines on a daily basis, to now having no strength in
my right side. I can’t bend my knee without considerable effort, and now
I can’t hold a pen, or even a fork. This is frightening enough,
considering my right hand is my dominant one, but the bigger issue is
that I still don’t have a diagnosis as to what is wrong. The
possibilities run from MS, to nerve damage, to even possibly a stroke.
Walking
is difficult for me. I drag my foot, and my ankle rolls often. My knee
buckles and I crash to the floor. This happened while I was in the
hospital, and now it’s happening multiple times a day.
I need to get
support braces for my joints, especially my knee and ankle. Wrist and
finger splints will help me be able to hold a pen to be able to draw
again, as well as feed myself without spilling. I may also need a cane
for particularly bad days.
Any additional funds will go toward
transporting me to and from my many MANY doctor’s appointments as we
look for a diagnosis for what is wrong.
If you submit
screenshots of your donation for $50.00 or more, I will write you a story
of your prompting, up to five thousand words!
This is an example of the support I’m looking for for my hand
Even if you aren’t able to support, I would appreciate it if you reblogged this to boost it and support a disabled queer NB.
I’ve raised my target goal because I have an appointment with an ophthalmologist in a few days to find out if there is an underlying cause to the vision loss and pain in my left eye. Odds are pretty good that I will need eyeglasses on top of everything else. If I don’t, I will close up the fundraiser.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 