Not surprised unfortunately. My only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Today, I had to dip into my savings to buy my 60 day asthma inhaler. It costs me forty dollars a month to breathe. And I have insurance. My electricity bill is less than that.
Insulin costs have went through the roof. It has doubled in the last 2 years. My insurance company insists I attend a monthly diabetic clinic so I get a bit cut off the price of my co-pay. The real savings are the free insulin pens they give out at this clinic. I grab as many as they’ll let me have.
Insulin making companies are very good at making slight tweaks in the manufacturing process and the molecule which serve no significant patient benefit, but enable them to claim a new patent and keep exclusivity.
Nobody in the US makes the old style cheaper insulins anymore. Just the molecularly engineered, cell-based stuff which is super high tech.
The health insurance system is obviously terrible, but I’m a little dismayed at the degree to which I’ve seen this portrayed in the media as a healthcare issue rather than an inexcusable violent crime. This woman died because she was a victim of domestic violence.
About half of my fixed SS income goes for insulin and other medical expenses. And that’s with Medicare and supplemental insurance. If I were single, and didn’t have my husband’s income, I’d be dead already, through insufficient insulin or suicide.
Or it was suicide by husband. It is a healthcare issue because our profit-driven system is not concerned with people’s health. It’s only concerned with how much money it can make for the CEOs and shareholders. The result is that it drives people into desperation, and sometimes suicide, instead of helping them.
Yeah, my default is that murder victims didn’t want to die, and abusers are always full of excuses for why it’s not their fault.
Dozens of ill and disabled people are murdered by their caregivers every year, and unfortunately this isn’t the first time the reporting was implicitly sympathetic to the killer with no good reason:
Victims of murder, pretty much by definition, don’t want to die. Which is why an assisted suicide is not reasonably described as murder, and why those doing the assisting sound to you like they’re full of excuses. Everything sounds like a lie when you’re not approaching a situation truthfully.
My grandmother killed herself over medical bills in 1968. Her disease was depression. She was bankrupting the family trying (and failing with 1968 technology) to get better.
This kind of sympathy affects Canada as well. Years ago, Robert Latimer killed his very disabled daughter Tracy, and the media’s reaction was … ambivalent. Some supported him, some didn’t.
Canada recently passed an assisted suicide law. Among other things, the law is supposed to ensure that the person who wants to die actually wants to die.
If the US had an assisted suicide law, there would be proof one way or the other. Simply put, he could have gone through the formal channels, which would of course involve people talking to his wife separately to find out if she actually wanted this. If there were formal channels and he didn’t take them, that would be evidence against assisted suicide.