'Caravan of Americans' cross into Canada to get affordable insulin
43 replies, posted
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/caravan-of-americans-cross-into-canada-just-to-get-affordable-insulin-1.4415683?cid=sm%3Atrueanthem%3Actvnews%3Apost&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+New+Content+%28Feed%29&utm_content=5cd4db45df4239000111ff35&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2dX0uz4sbj_jj3lCO9ItxxzXqqKVSbiw6oYh4GoedpaMQ5KTPU9Fisug4
BUILD THE WALL NOW
the us really is a shithole country
Does this count as a humanitarian crisis yet?
Yea down here in Texas I dont even have that luxury, paying 30 dollars a bottle currently from wal-mart which is the cheapest you can get and this stuff only works if you stick to a strict diet.
Leave it to america to allow the exploitation of injured and ill people out of a fair chance at life to buy a 3rd private jet for some corporate fat cat.
Nystrom told CTVNews.ca that in Canada, she bought the “same, exact” medication -- used to regulate her blood glucose levels -- at essentially a tenth of what it would cost in the U.S.
“We got so much interest about this and so many people -- who haven't gone before -- now want to go because the insulin was 10 times cheaper in Canada,” Nystrom said in a phone interview. “So we want to go back.”
She ended up paying approximately US$300 in Ontario but the same amount of Insulin in the U.S. would have cost her around US$3,300. “It was such huge discrepancy in cost with just a five-hour drive -- it was really quite crazy,” she said.
Nystrom said everyone saved significant amounts of money -- despite what they paid for in lodging, gas and food.
I saw a quote in a different article covering the story, where they said that it'd take hours and over a dozen calls to a bunch of different places to arrange their daughter's insulin supply (dealing with insurance, copay, etc.) but driving up to Canada was literally a case of, go up there, walk into the pharmacy, ask for the type of insulin they need, get handed the insulin they asked for. Down in the US it was a hellish bureaucracy trying to get insurance to pay for the insulin, up in Canada it's a thing they bought over the counter like any normal thing.
Fucking hell. This is what a slowly-collapsing system looks like.
AND IM PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN
WHERE ATLEAST I KNOW IM FREE
AND I WON'T FORGET THE ONES WHO DIED
WHO GAVE THAT RIGHT TO ME
AND I'D GLADLY STAND UP NEXT TO YOU
AND DEFEND HER STILL TODAY
CAUSE THERE AIN'T NO DOUBT
I LOVE THIS LAND
GOD BLESS THE USA
I didn't know it was that hard to get it in the states, jesus.
See, the free market works! They only had to travel to another country to buy affordable life saving medicine, just the cost of doing business
Pharmaceutical companies are probably taking note of this too as we speak, it's bad for their profits if people just get medicine outside the U.S. I won't be surprised if legislation starts passing to prevent or eventually allow searching of crossing vehicles to just take away any medicine that people try to bring back.
you have to pay for medicine in america? wow...
This is partly why I've been thinking about how to get my whole family (five people) up to Canada. Things are getting bad down here and I'm losing hope that the country will actually recover rather than collapse in on itself entirely. My dad will finally qualify for Medicare in July, and then he'll still have to shop for a supplement plan despite that. When I imagine that he'd get even better service than a supplement and for an actually reasonable price in Canada. Not to mention my mom and sister both have a myriad of medical problems, and my brother and I have our own particular needs as well. I'm at least on Medicaid until I find work, but my brother actually has a job so he's out of luck unless he pays extortionate prices.
You think it's bad now but it's gonna be even worse when the US government inevitably bans importing medicine because it's supposedly dangerous or some shit
Just wait until they start confiscating medicine that people brought over with them originally from the US too because they're incompetent and US border security are absolute fucking assholes.
Overhauling our medical system is inevitable, its so wildly inefficient its actually mind boggling. The only reason it exist as it does now is due to cronyism.
Why in God's name would a market where the option is "pay for this thing or die" have no business being regulated to an extreme degree? This level of extortion is practically criminal.
Caravan of Americans makes them sound like desert nomads riding on camels from Sahara.
After working at a pharmacy and seeing people pay upwards of $10,000 for their insulin and antiseizure and seeing people be outright refused service because their 6 pills of chemo meds (which would cost them like $3000 btw) costs $50,000 on our end because the pharmaceutical company only wholesales it in massive quantities, I'm not surprised that people are jumping the border for medication. I also won't be surprised when the US inevitably criminalizes importations of restricted medicines because pharma companies are losing <0.1% of their profit from this. And people wonder why Americans are some of the most stressed people in the world. Fuck the healthcare racket.
Something is clearly wrong when people essentially have to rely on various styles of crowdfunding just to keep up with this shit.
It's an attempt to draw a parrallel to the caravan of refugees from Mexico that everyone in AMerica got so riled up about. It might be a stretch, but it's not a bad observation. Why the fuck do Americans get to be luxury tourists/migrants while gatekeeping their own borders as if there's any prosperity to lose or share, LMFAO.
It's essentially a giant callout of the most hypocritical country in the world.
For the record, the sane among us (a.k.a. Democrats) don't mind Mexicans trying to come up here to find a better life... particularly those of us who are thinking of going further north to Canada for the same thing. At this rate, I'd even recommend the Mexicans keep going further north and pass right through my country, rather than actually stopping here.
The American Revolution was a mistake
I remember glancing and seeing the headline for it on the news and figuring it would be for something like major medical care, but the fact it's for goddamn insulin of all things is just plain depressing.
This shit is scary, man. I'm under the assumption that if I were to be sick, i'd have to be working even harder because of some ass backwards logic. I'd be fucked if something were to happen while I have no insurance.
This is why when I get cancer from smoking I just want to die. I don't want to put my family or son into debt. Just let me die. And I smoke because I want to die.
"Hey, I know you've only got enough insulin for one more day but you have to come in to work for the rest of the week in order to hope to afford more."
North Korea? China? Venezuela? Nope, the self-described greatest country in the world.
And if you aren't close enough to hop the Canadian border to buy your insulin, well I guess you'll fucking die then.
Under what delusion is this an example of the free market at work?
If anything, them going across the border to buy a cheaper product is the free market at work more than anything else in this story.
FREE TO BE EXPLOITED.
We need to fix this shit, but nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find a politician who isn't being paid off by some corporation. Our government doesn't care about us. They only care about money.
There's an actually free market where anyone rigging insulin prices to 10x would be undercut by competitors years ago, and then there are the policies advocated by so-called "free market" types, often "free market libertarians" who see the market as a protected safe space, with just enough regulation to maintain monopolization but not enough to interfere with corporations in any way except maybe in the case of someone literally murdering their employees in the street. The term "free" here is a lie designed to sugarcoat the underlying greedy motive.
These types exist and they have too much power and influence in all levels of government, which is to say more than none.
Can you give an example of someone influential laying out this sort of argument?
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