Last Wednesday, the same day UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, an assistant pharmacist at Walgreens phoned me.
The prescription for needles that fit my insulin pen, she said, can no longer be filled, because my insurance company, Aetna, is now insisting it must be done through the mail, in 90-day batches. I might be able to get an exception, but should call Aetna.
No problem! Calling people is what I do for a living. I phoned the number on the back of my insurance card, jumping online — multi-tasking! — during the long delay to try their website.
Online, a form to fill out and mail to Texas, along with my credit card number. I gazed at the form and tried to imagine it resulting in boxes of BD Nano 2nd Gen 4 mm Pen Needles showing up on my doorstep. Unlikely.
Meanwhile, on the phone, I was passed along to several people whose mastery of English was sub-ideal. My suggestion of an exception meant nothing. Negotiations for obtaining the needles via the mail went nowhere. Eventually, what we worked out was that I should have my doctor call in a 90-day prescription to CVS — did I mention that CVS owns Aetna? It's true. My cost for three boxes — a 90-day supply — would be $78.
Now I've liked CVS ever since Nicholson Baker published "The Mezzanine," a lapidary little novel about a man who breaks his shoelace and goes to CVS to buy a new one. Excellent, but not enough to snatch brand loyalty away from Walgreens, a venerable Chicago company that invented the malted milkshake. I can ride my bike to Walgreens. Plus I know people there, thanks to routine visits to secure the seven prescriptions I need every day so as not to die from diabetes.
Social media exploded with joy at the slaying of Thompson. Many Americans are denied medical care, either because they can't navigate the insurance labyrinth or because companies say no to necessary treatment in some arbitrary fashion. Countless people have endured the agony of watching loved ones suffer and die because an unseen bean counter wouldn't check a box.
Let me be clear. All killing is bad, but Thompson's slaying is especially bad because it was a targeted assassination. There are many countries in the world where helmeted assassins on mopeds routinely gun down executives on crowded city streets then roar away. We don't want to live in one of those countries — well, we already do, given last week's slaying. We don't want it to get worse.
There is another way. Even bad events can have good results. We should never lose sight that this is the killing of a husband and father of two, but Thompson's death starkly publicizes the injustice, if not horror, of the American healthcare system, where needing medical care is dismissed as a "preexisting condition." We are the only industrialized nation without national medicine, and the man just re-elected president has thundered for years against Obamacare, the most successful innovation in recent memory that allowed millions of Americans to afford health insurance. Not to forget he has appointed a certified anti-vaxxer to be the secretary of health and human services.
I've had my medical woes over the past five years — a rebuilt spine, artificial hip, and now I have to spend the rest of my life as an insulin junkie shooting up in restaurant bathrooms. But as bothersome as these are, I feel both profoundly grateful for the amazing medical care my union won for me and deep sadness that everyone else shouldn't receive the same. It's bad enough to be sick; to be sick and plunged into Kafkaesque bureaucratic subhell is a cruelty that shouldn't be permitted by the same species that designed something as sleek and painless as a NovoLog FlexPen fitted with a 4 mm disposable needle.
Speaking of which. I hung up on Aetna, but did not phone one of my doctors. I drove over to Walgreens, where the pharmacist showed me a box of Unifine Pentips 4 mm needles that he said are even better than the ones I am using: $27 a box, no prescription necessary. A dollar more than I'd pay at CVS after jumping through Aetna's hoops, assuming it is humanly possible.
Health care is a human right. Americans have lost sight of that — we've lost sight of a lot of things, a people so lost we don't value our own one precious, fleeting life in this still-fine world. We gotta fix that, as fellow citizens, working together. Shooting one another won't solve anything.
