Brien Johnson and his wife of Sterling, Va. Brien was diagnosed with mantle-cell lymphoma.
Credit: Lexey Swall/Wall Street Journal
Jacqueline Racener ’s doctor prescribed a new leukemia drug for her last winter that promised to roll back the cancer in her blood with only moderate side effects.
Then she found out how much it would cost her: nearly $8,000 for a full year, even after Medicare picked up most of the tab.
“There’s no way I could do that,” Ms. Racener says. “It was just prohibitive.” Worried about depleting her limited savings, Ms. Racener, a 76-year-old legal secretary, decided to take the risk and not fill her prescription.
The pharmaceutical industry, after a long drought, has begun to produce more innovative treatments for serious diseases that can extend life and often have fewer side effects than older treatments. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved 41 new drugs, the most in nearly two decades.
The catch is their […]
These are reasons why Bernie Sanders’ ideas for an updated Medicare program which can get the prices down by bargaining for better prices would save lives, and this hits home for my family since my wife has diabetes and congestive heart failure problems which have exorbitant costs for us in the co-pays which would have driven us into bankruptcy long ago if we did not grow 50% of our own food, although we still need to spend $500 or more on food and essentials every month at the grocery stores. Their cost for food must be for junk food, not healthy, organic, non-GMO food which is the only way to stay healthy, not to mention the supplements needed to counter the side effects of the necessary drugs the pharmaceutical companies produce. It is not the same in other countries where the costs are controlled, just like Sanders has tried to explain to the public.
People need to turn their attention to food and supplements as a better source of health. The benefits of many meds are marginal and most of them have a wide range of nasty side effects that more than cancels out the benefits of taking them.