Furfaro who previously had a heart-transplant, discovered he’d hit the doughnut hole (coverage gap)last month after getting refills for immunosuppressants. medications. The pharmacist charged him $661 and $329 for the prescriptions, instead of his co-pays.
Furfaro wasn’t told about the doughnut hole when his coverage changed in January.
“I threw a fit. What am I supposed to do? I don’t have $661 in my pocket. I thought, `That’s it. It’s over.’ The three years I put into the transplant, the waiting and everything. It was a waste of time because I can’t get my medicine.”
continued
His father purchased the cheaper drug of the two. However, Furfaro has gone more than three weeks without a prescription to prevent severe organ rejection and has been receiving Social Seurity Disabiity. Despite that, he recently took a position as a security guard to pay for his prescritptions
Furfaro is having health problems.
“I lay around a lot. I don’t have a lot of energy. I’m short of breath. I don’t feel well at all.”
If his health contnues to deteriorate, he’ll be admitted to the hospital to receive his medicine. Medicare will pay all bills for a hospitalization.
Robert Hayes of the Medicare Rights Center:
“Millions of people and millions more family members are going to be experiencing this shocking and crushing problem. That’s what happens when people can’t get the basic care they need. And medicine is basic care.”
Hayes also added that he expects that scenario to occur repeatedly across the country.
If Congress had premitted Medicare to negotiate for the best price of prescriptions, the savings would allow for prescription coverage with no interruptions. Another problem is the insistence on the donut hole in the Part D legislation.
Juliette Cubanski, of the Kaiser Family Foundation,
“[The donut hole] is not something we’ve ever seen in any other insurance product that I’m aware of.”
xposted at the Orange place, MLW and at epm
What next???
“What next???”
Unfortunately, the answer to that is probably an upsurge of business for undertakers and funeral homes while other families beggar themselves trying to pay for Grandma’s prescriptions. Of course, the lobbyists foresaw this and tightened the bankruptcy laws in advance so that’s not an easy way out either. There are a number of letters to the editor in today’s Detroit Free Press on the subject of Plan D and the difficulties people faced in choosing a plan by last Monday only to realize that they’re going to have to go through it all over again come November and then only have 6 weeks to navigate the maze.
Could you link to it? I am digging into a lot of other stuff as well. Thanks.
This should get you there.
Maybe that is why they wanted onlyh 6 month sign up period, so those horror stories would not be out there. What is the purpose of charging the full rate…why can they be civilized and charge the previously covered rate?
I mean that is price gouging…nothing less.
Maybe that is why they wanted onlyh 6 month sign up period, so those horror stories would not be out there.
I have to really dig to find out about info like this.
On that note, it is coming in bits and pieces. And there are more that weren’t reported, I’d bet on it!
saving up for medications so that his transplant won’t be rejected.
Homeland Security, indeed.
There is only one logical reason for the donut hole to exist. That reason is that any poor person who’s life is at risk and represents a Catastrophic Liability is purged from the system permanently .
Make no mistake about it, this is murder by intentional neglect and denial of life saving medications.
This is class genocide with a very fine lens focused on the poorest who because they are poor and cannot afford these medication and so will die in short order after they can no longer pay for them.
Since they will die in vast number within a short time period of the failure to receive these medications there will be no chance for them to survive long enough to bring suit in court litigation to receive the life saving medications in time to save their lives.
How that for a purge people. They don’t need gulag’s or to fire up the ovens anymore because they figured out a way to kill the undesirables (parasite’s to quote Jack Welsh of GE) that cost the system the most to maintain after they become unproductive workers due to illness or age.
Every elected representative who voted for the inclusion of the donut hole should be charged under criminal statues with murder by willful negligence.
Every insurance lobbyist should be charged with being an accessory to murder under criminal statues.
This is murder and class genocide, plain and simple as the nose on your face.
Actually, the poorest of the poor don’t have a donut hole, assuming that they were on Medicaid to begin with. They also don’t have the high premiums that other seniors have. Some people are going to save money; the majority won’t.
I think the folks who are really going to get hit are the ones who had some money, who don’t qualify for the so-called ‘safety net,’ like the guy in the diary. He can still work, so he has to do so. But he’s probably minimally productive at best.
And even for people who continue to work past the age of 65, many employers don’t offer them the standard healthcare package; those are the ones who are also going to get slammed.
Reminiscent of Logan’s Run, a bit. Someone deems you unproductive, you’re done for.
The poorest of the poor just die un-noticed by anyone because it’s too hard to get into the system to start with. What good is preventive medicine when your already dead or close to it?
This is going to be crushing for millions of seniors. It really begs the question of why they would build in this time bomb scheduled to hit right in the middle of midterm election season. It can’t be as simple as greed, can it? Is this planned obsolescence or something. Is this so the House and Senate can go back and say “See, we tried government-run health care, but it doesn’t work, so it’s time to repeal it!”
In other words, is this designed to turn the American people off to any kind of single-payer care system?
Seems like murder by the numbers-the numbers being the beginning of the 2 thousand something donut hole and up to 5 thousand something.
Something else in those numbers in the donut hole bullshit…that is any drug you are paying for yourself(if you can)that isn’t on your insurers list does NOT count towards the end of the donut hole. That was specifically put into this fucked up bill also. Making it even harder for you to get to the pot of gold at the end of the donut hole. Just one more truly sickening little detail in this murderous bill. More WTF kind of shit is this?