Feel free to contact me ann@defendhealth.org to verfiy first-hand what my family went thru fighting to access needed care for my sister’s health care needs after she developed the bio-chemical brain disease called schizophrenia.
We had to do battle over accessing needed hospitalizations, recommended medications, group home placements (minimal group homes avail. back then so my mom spent all her savings on a private place in Brookline that was lousy but was “the best around”). Thankfully, my sister’s doing much better now, on Clozapine, and lives in an apt with 2 cats and works part-time at a library. But still today for many folks with these illnesses, who maybe don’t have family that can navigate and advocate for them, the needed care and related services are grossly under-funded and unavailable.
Ours is an “unbelievable” but all too true story: To get my sister access to her medication Clozapine, the medication her doctor at McLean recommended, we had to advocate endlessly it seemed with the director of psychopharmacology at McLean, then the hospital president who never returned my calls or letter, and as it turned out he resigned shortly thereafter in a plagarism scandal.
After months and months, maybe over a year, reaching the point of desperation when other family members pretty much gave up, I thought of calling the Guv and Kennedy. The next week my sister was started on her needed medications, which have made a world of difference in her life. No more active psychotic symptoms, no repeated hospitalizations year after year (think of the unecessary expense much less the preventable suffering), no more being a haggard shell of her former self.
Finally she was able to escape the horrible side effects of the older, cheaper meds she’d been on for years (Haldol, thorazine). Meds that caused tremors so severe that she was always spilling things all over herself and was usually covered with stains, slurred speech, urinary incontinence at times, and sedation that left her in a druggged haze much of the time-all this when the recommended improved medications existed but “the system” would not allow her access to them.
Similar stories are being played out in every state across the country. The current political system is largely corrupted by corporate/ industry special interests and the money they wield to exert their power. We’ve got to rise up.
That’s why citizen activists are fighting for a Massachusetts Constitutional Amendment to enact a safeguard, a guarantee to ensure equal access to comprehensive medical care, mental health services, and prescription drugs and devices (such as glucometers, prosthetics, etc).
We need your help. Join us at http://www.HealthCareForMass.org
The system reform needed to ensure equal access to timely care, reduce costs, and improve quality cannot be achieved incrementally. It’s a waste of time to try and take these on to reform one at a time; each is an inter-related part of the overall whole-as dysfunctional, fragmented, and obscenely wasteful as our current system is.
And don’t even get me started on how stupid it is to try and legislate access to care one disease at a time. There’ll always be the poor souls whose diseases are left out. And that approach ignores and wastes the obvious economic and humaitarian value of universal coverage to ensure equal access to primary PREVENTIVE care.
See BMG post “Healthcare costs cannot be controlled locally”, too.
The incremental approach of tackling one component of the system at a time just makes things worse in the other areas, which is what you’ll see if you look around-more uninsured in the state than ever, higher costs than ever (highest in the nation, with us taxpayers/our state budget footing most of the bill), and quality in the tank in many places and not consistently high anywhere. Take a look at the IOM report data on preventable medical errors-scary stuff.
So, knowing this to be true and well known, what goes on under “our” golden dome?
hmm, which will it be with my bill, issue x, y, or z?
access, cost control or quality?
asks the legislator or power-broker who wants to try and do something
but not do so much that it would cause a real fuss
challenge the immensely powerful “not-for-profit” market-driven structure that controls healthcare
and you’ll get more than a scare
from this gang that wields excessive influence over the political process
you’ll end up in a truss.
