Back Page News: The Financial Burden of Healthcare in America

By Carol Bradley Bursack

$593.43. I’m standing at the pharmacy counter. If I write a check, I can’t pay my house payment.

$593.43. I pull out a credit card, grit my teeth and slide the card through.

I work for a good company, one that was willing to hire me at age 56 after a divorce and twenty years out of the “real” work force. I have health insurance and prescription coverage.

$593.43 is the amount I needed to pay for most – not all, but most – of the medications my son and I required for that month. This amount is the co-pay and the 30 percent the insurance doesn’t cover. I still had a few more prescriptions to go.

Streaming through my head: Skip the meds? Then how do I work? What will happen to my son?

$593.43 is a figure that sticks in my mind, because I called in a large batch of prescription re-fills all at once that month. Usually, I break it down more, picking up some week by week. That doesn’t make it cheaper, but it makes it less shocking.

$593.43. Shocking is the only word that works.

I am the sole provider for my youngest son, Adam, and myself. He has Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (JRA), asthma, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), migraines and allergies. I have Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), allergies, and migraines.

The migraine medication is an enormous expense, but I wouldn’t be able to work without it. I’ve had chronic migraines since I was fifteen and had whiplash. Arthritis has eaten into my neck vertebrae so badly that one doctor thought I had bone cancer, after evaluating my x-ray. The muscles have “healed” into a twisted mass. Each doctor who has viewed an x-ray has shaken his head and wondered how I function.

Function? I’ve always told my son that this is the life we have, so we have to give it everything we can. We don’t want just to function. We want to live, and we live with grateful hearts.

Pain has taught us both to appreciate what really matters, like family, friends, and a terrific community. Still, this is the real world. The real world demands that I work. I want to work. I need medication to function so I can work. Yet, the cost of the medication puts me in debt. Something seems wrong with that equation.

Could I go on disability? Likely, but I don’t want to. Could Adam? Yes, but I don’t want to sentence him to a life of poverty. I want to see him get well enough to use his enormous talent, help others, and earn a decent living. But will he ever be able to afford his medications? Am I still too idealistic after all these years?

How do I not buy his medications? I’m his mother.

The lyrics of songs Adam writes scream out the physical and emotional pain he’s lived with since, as a very young child, a virus kicked in his genetic illnesses. Young people find their own messages of pain, physical and emotional, in his literary lyrics. One song, “Back Page News” prompts tearful emails from anorexics and other teens. Adam sings:

When I die, will I be above the fold