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.
🚨 BREAKING: Acting AG Todd Blanche announces 455 FRAUDSTERS have been charged by the DOJ in the past 14 days alone
These people scammed the American people out of over $6.5 BILLION.
Make them ROT!
"These individuals participated in healthcare fraud schemes involving over $6.5 billion in false claims submitted to Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs."
"The indictment also alleges that these individuals then used the taxpayer money to bankroll multimillion-dollar homes, luxury vehicles like a $135,000 Maserati, jewelry like an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, and to top it all off, to fund the construction of a $4.6 million hotel at a beach resort in the Philippines."
"We're taking back the money, the luxury cars, the jewelry, and these alleged fraudsters will face justice."
This is modern slavery: Muslims are enslaving Black Christian Africans.
Yet mainstream media, leftists, the UN, and the woke Pope stay silent on Muslim-on-Christian crimes.
Pray for the safety of Christians in Africa?
A. Yes
B. No
“We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government. We’re over here to breed, we are going to take over.”
That’s what one of the Dewsbury grooming gang rapists told his victim.
Not poverty. Not “cultural misunderstanding”. Not random crime by “Asians”.
This was muslim men operating with a clear religious and racial ideology.
White non-Muslim girls were “slags”, “trash”, and “kuffar whores”, fair game for grooming, gang rape, trafficking, and beatings.
Muslim girls were “pure”. White girls deserved it.
Some perpetrators quoted scripture and framed their actions as religiously justified superiority over infidels.
When the government repeatedly sides with the ideological rapists over its own children, when it betrays fathers and communities trying to protect their daughters, don’t act shocked when people lose faith in the system and take matters into their own hands.
This is demographic and cultural conquest.
An existential attack on Britain enabled by the very people sworn to defend it.
The absolutely filthy anti-white, anti-Christian racist Mehdi Hasan calls the Casey report and the whole push for truth “bullshit.”
The rapists’ own words in court and the girls they destroyed say otherwise.
Denial this loud only confirms who’s still protecting the narrative and why.
“Jesus is real.”
These were the last written words of Jonathan Sia, a 23-year-old student from the Philippines, just one week away from graduating magna cum laude
Battling a severe kidney disorder in the hospital, Jonathan, known as a prayer warrior who loved Jesus since childhood, continued sharing the Gospel with doctors and nurses even while suffering.
Too weak to speak clearly, he signaled for a pen and paper. With trembling hands, he miraculously wrote three clear, legible words: “Jesus is real.” Moments later, as his mother witnessed a radiant light and a sense of heavenly presence, Jonathan passed away peacefully with a smile on his face.
His father, Joel Sia, shared this moving testimony that has touched countless hearts worldwide. In his final act, Jonathan left behind a profound witness: even in the face of death, the reality of Christ shines brighter than any suffering.
Tolkien’s greatest insight was that evil loses because it cannot imagine goodness.
That makes The Lord of the Rings far deeper than a simple story of heroes and monsters. Sauron is stronger than his enemies in armies, weapons, fear, and force, yet he makes one fatal mistake: he assumes everyone else wants power the way he does.
He cannot imagine someone carrying the Ring all the way to Mordor just to destroy it.
That is why Frodo’s mission works. Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Elrond understand the temptation of evil, so they refuse the Ring.
Sauron understands only domination, so he watches the wrong places, fears the wrong enemies, and misses the small, broken hobbit walking toward the fire.
Even Gollum matters because Tolkien refuses to make the moral world too clean. He is dangerous, twisted, and ruined by the Ring, but he still receives pity. Bilbo spares him. Frodo pities him. Sam struggles with him. In the end, the creature everyone wanted to dismiss becomes part of the world’s rescue.
And that is why Tolkien still hits so hard.
Victory in Middle-earth comes with wounds. The Shire is saved, but Frodo cannot fully return to it. The Ring is destroyed, but beauty fades with it. Evil falls, but the cost remains.
Tolkien understood something most modern stories forget: goodness wins when it refuses to become what it is fighting.
And that is the age old lesson that many nations have yet to learn in the modern day.
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@BishopBarron Very strong statement, will the Vatican do something? Modernism and relativism are destroying culture worldwide and nobody seems to be waking up to it.
If only anyone had been warning about this for the past decade!
Oh. Wait...
"In August, 2016, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia — a vocal advocate for Communion for the “remarried” who was responsible for inviting homosexual couples to the 2015 World Meeting of Families — was chosen by Pope Francis to head up the Pontifical Academy for Life, as well as the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Paglia — who was later discovered (without consequence) to have been responsible for commissioning of a homoerotic mural featuring his likeness in his Cathedral in Terni-Narni-Amelia — told Vatican Radio upon news of his appointment that he believed the pope wanted him to continue the “new course” that came from the synods, as well as from Amoris Laetitia. Having taken over the institute founded by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Caffarra, Paglia said, “I understand the pope’s [Francis] own wish for a kind of acceleration of the nearness of the Church and for the breaching of borders — with reflection, courage, and creativity.”
[...]
In November, 2016, the entire membership of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) — another creation of Pope John Paul II, now also under Archbishop Paglia — was dismissed, including those members, like Professor Josef Seifert, who were appointed to their positions for life. At the same time, the statutes were re-written in such a way that members would no longer be required to sign a declaration stating they would uphold Catholic teachings on life. The requirement that members be Catholic was also dropped. By June of 2017, the pope had appointed 45 new ordinary members of the emptied-out PAL, some of whom were, by Paglia’s own admission, non-believers, and at least one of whom was a known supporter of abortion up to 18 weeks of gestation.
[...]
By July of 2017, the Humanae Vitae commission’s existence was being summarily denied by Archbishop Paglia. However, Monsignor Marengo admitted in an interview with Vatican Radio that a “research group” looking into Humanae Vitae did exist, although he insisted that it was “a work of historical-critical investigation without any aim other than reconstructing as well as possible the whole process of composing the encyclical.”
https://t.co/q9YEk9Jw1j
In a recent interview, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, former grand chancellor of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life, confirmed the worst suspicions that many of us had.
He admitted that the changes he made at the Institute during the Pope Francis years were designed to initiate a "very profound" reform of the idea of the natural law.
Instead of absolute moral norms grounded in a keen understanding of the basic goods, he and his colleagues were proposing a moral theory rooted in historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience--not an "armchair theology" but one operating "within history and within people's lives."
This, of course, is the language of trendy postmodernism, and it is dangerous indeed.
Allow me to illustrate the principle with one example. Is slavery wrong?
Intrinsically wrong? Wrong no matter what public opinion polls say about it, no matter what the current consensus on it might be? I imagine any decent person would say yes.
But that yes is predicated upon precisely what the tradition calls the natural law and the basic goods. There are some values so fundamental that acts repugnant to them are by their very nature wicked.
If you want a highly articulate presentation of this idea, go to St. John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor.
If we say that this is just "armchair theologizing" and that morality is a function of ever-shifting cultural and experiential data, then why couldn't slavery be justified?
One of the very smartest persons that ever lived, the philosopher Aristotle, thought it was; extremely bright and morally upright persons in our country, well into the 19th century, thought it was permissible.
Who is to say whether the consensus might shift back again? Who is to say that "lived experience" might come to justify it?
What any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms.
Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible.
The Archbishop's interview, frankly, reminded me of the discussions I had at the Synod on Synodality with some of my German colleagues. Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality. If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas.
Link to the article below.
Lola Sheen, daughter of Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, says her life was transformed after a powerful encounter with Jesus during a season of deep depression and insecurity.
Though she grew up Catholic, Sheen said she
"always knew of Jesus" but "never knew Him." Struggling with mental health, and feelings of unworthiness, she hit what she described as "rock bottom." One night, overwhelmed by hopeless thoughts, she experienced what she believes was a personal encounter with Christ.
"I really don't know how else to put it except the fact that Jesus came in my room," she said. "His presence came to me... and I felt this sense of peace." She described it as Jesus taking her hand and saying, "I am here to rescue you and try this again now with Me."
Since then, Sheen says she has formed a real relationship with Christ. "Jesus really did find me... He chose me first," she said. "My life really was forever changed."
🚨Esta historia es de terror. Los medios lo han ocultado todo. Ocurrió ayer en Almería (España). Joven ilegal de 21 años entra en una autocaravana con una navaja. Se desnuda. Agrede sexualmente a una chica alemana de que estaba descansando dentro. La golpea brutalmente dejándole la cara desfigurada.
La encontraron gravemente herida y la trasladaron al Hospital Materno Infantil de Almería, activando el protocolo de agresiones sexuales.
La Policía localizó al sospechoso, escondido. Al verse acorralado, corrió hacia el mar y se adentró 100 metros pese al fuerte oleaje y viento.
Empezó a hundirse y a dar síntomas de ahogamiento.
Cinco agentes se lanzaron al agua revuelta para rescatarlo. Lo sacaron con dificultad (el agresor apenas colaboraba) y lo estabilizaron en la arena.
Los cinco policías necesitaron asistencia médica por lesiones durante el rescate.
Solo un periodico local lo ha registrado, porque en España está prohibido informar sobre cualquier cosa que rompa la narrativa pro inmigración masiva del gobierno socialista. Esta son las consecuencias. Que todo el mundo lo sepa.
Which PROVES that the men - and not too many at that - will need to fix this problem.
The crown is complicit
The government is coordinating
The media is campaigning
The cops are compromised
The NGOs are capitalizing
The liberals are cheering
The women are crushed
The nation is CONQUERED
Mel Gibson: "I consider the Gospels to be verifiable history... every single one of those guys [the Apostles] died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody."
Nobody dies for a lie.
@EricLDaugh@POTUS create a guard program of retired military to guard our monuments in each state. Americans can donate to the fund to pay them something.
@SamaHoole Plastic clothes are pushed everywhere over cotton and wool. They’re given names like moisture wicking, but in reality you’re essentially wearing a trash bag.