@Marsha250 Perhaps it’s time to just take these issues directly to the voters and bypass all the congressional grifters who don’t understand what it means to actually represent the voters!!
@OcrazioCornPop@MikeDeWine He ruined the Ohio state teachers’ retirement system as well leaving us without any cost of living increase for over a decade! We were GUARANTEED a 3% annual increase based on original final salary and not compounded. Those working FOR us got annual raises and hefty bonuses!!!
@TheGuyOverThere@GuntherEagleman Yep! Don’t hear a peep from any of them until election time rolls around. Then my mailbox is full of their lies and empty promises while my phone constantly rings with more nonsense. (Their do-not-call law exempts them!) Ballots should include a “none of the above” option!!!!!
@BuzzPatterson They let it decline into an abomination. They screamed at the cost of restoring what they had not cared for whatsoever. (No noise about the billions & billions of fraud though!) When the nation rejoiced “We’re back!” they destroyed it. Now it costs even more in repairs & fencing.
@GuntherEagleman Over 80% of “we the people” support this legislation. We PAY our representatives to represent us. Get in there and fight! Get this done! Now!
My wife and I own Forest Park Pharmacy, and we don't accept insurance. None of it. That decision is exactly why we could fix what happened to a patient today.
A family came in wanting to transfer their kid's antibiotic to us. The child had already STARTED the course. Then, mid-treatment, the insurance company decided the last 14 tablets suddenly needed a "prior authorization" before the other pharmacy could hand them over. A sick kid, halfway through an antibiotic, and the answer was "please hold."
The drug is linezolid. It's a generic. It's been generic for over a decade. It treats serious gram-positive infections — the kind you do NOT want to stop antibiotics in the middle of, because an interrupted course is how you breed resistant bugs and end up right back where you started.
So why the hold-up on a cheap, common generic? Follow the fake math.
Insurance and the PBMs behind them price drugs off a number called AWP — "Average Wholesale Price." People in my industry have another name for it: "Ain't What's Paid." It's a benchmark number, not a real-world cost. On paper, the AWP for just those last 14 tablets is about $2,500.
My cash price for the same 14 tablets? $18.
Read that again. The system that's supposedly "protecting" this family from cost is the same system that inflated an $18 medication into a $2,500 line item, then slapped a prior auth on it to "review the expense" THEY invented. They manufactured the problem, then billed everyone for the privilege of solving it — and made a sick kid wait while they did it.
This is the whole game. When a drug is priced honestly, there's nothing to "manage." When it's priced off a fantasy benchmark, you get spread pricing, PA paperwork, pharmacy phone trees, and delayed treatment — all dressed up as cost control.
Here's the part nobody tells you: roughly 90% of prescriptions are low-cost generics. For the vast majority of what people pick up every day, running it through insurance does two things — raises the real cost and risks delaying your care. That's it. That's the value-add.
That's why we fired the insurance companies. No middleman deciding your kid can't finish their antibiotics on schedule. No fake prices. Just the real number, on the shelf, today.
The medication was always cheap. The insurance was the expensive part.
@Gene3713 Someone uttered “reparations” & everyone who saw an opportunity for money in their own pockets jumped on it. Neither they nor their parents were never slaves, & they have no clue how reparations were already received when Lincoln freed them! Thousands died for them too! Done.
@dariusrucker@drewnfilms Lots of Gamecock fans in that audience…some who remember the local venues in Columbia from college days back in the early 90s!!