My daughter has no insurance. She qualifies for none of the programs that help people with no insurance because she lives at home. Maybe we should just kick her out? I don’t think so. Johnson and Johnson produces one of the medications – the very expensive medication – she takes. They have a program which allows her to get assistance from them to get her medication. For the last year, she has been getting this nearly $700 prescription for free because of Johnson and Johnson.
She got a call from the doctor’s office to let her know Johnson and Johnson had sent them a form for the doctor to sign for her to continue to take this very expensive drug. This is great news as we were just talking about seeing what we had to do to continue with their program. However, the bad news (and you had to know there was some) came when the nurse told Vicki the doctor wouldn’t sign the form unless she came in for a visit.
Now Vicki has no job, no insurance, no income. If she goes to the doctor, I have to pay for it. She was unhappy about a completely unnecessary visit to the doctors’ office as it cost $108.78 for a miniscule visit. Literally they wanted us to pay that much money to get the doctor’s signature.
Obviously we had to because we sure cannot afford the roughly $700 a month and this drug works wonderfully for her. I feel we were robbed. We had no choice but to pay the doctor for his signature. Now I know the medical profession will say – we were paying for his expertise and he was being responsible about making sure she truly needs this drug.
I say it is a maintenance drug and there was no need to review whether it was needed. Nothing in her health has changed and all they did was rip us off. Our health care field is broken and we need to fix it. Maybe the politicians should be looking at that instead of being ridiculous about fiscal cliffs and other idiocy.