Drug Shortage

Perhaps a continuing theme of my writing's will be concerned with how few doctors there are. As previously noted, there is a shortage of primary care physicians in America. There is also a shortage of podiatrists. But did you know, that there is also, right now, a shortage of drugs in America?

I was just watching the national news last week when Diane Sawyer told me that the lack of prescription drugs in America was having real health consequences in America, with an estimated 15 deaths caused from drug shortages in the last year. Fifteen deaths. It doesn't sound that terrifying or even wrong if it's applied to something expected to be deadly in America, like Swine Flu or even just the regular type of influenza. But fifteen is a lot of lives lost if you consider that these afflictions were 100% treatable. I know morality and ethics tend to devolve into an annoying morass of public opinion sometimes, but if these people wanted to be alive yet couldn't make it because their health care providers couldn't provide the appropriate medicine, and then they died, that's wrong. Blatantly, offensively, inexcusably wrong. If I want to live, I should be afforded as much help as medically possible.

And do you know some of the theories behind why there are suddenly drug shortages in the nation that has the best health care in the world? Like everything else that's wrong with this country's politics, it's because of money. One of the suspected reasons drugs are suddenly hard to come by is because patents for some of the largest drugs have run out, which means they can start being manufactured and sold as cheaper generics from the non-original company. This means that the original company stops making as much of their product because they know they will lose profit as other pharmaceutical companies increase supply by mass producing generics. Except when they don't. And then, well, you know, people die.