My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

This past week, the opioid addiction prevention bill (HF 400) passed the Minnesota House by a vote of 94-34. This is a breakthrough for people who want to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable for helping to mitigate the cascading costs associated with opioid addiction. In 2017, 400 Minnesotans lost their battle to this disease, which often begins with a prescription written in a doctor’s office.

I haven’t found a calculation for Minnesota, but nationwide, the cost of opioid addiction was estimated to be at least $78.5 billion in 2013. (The study was published in Medical Care, an official journal of the American Public Health Association, in 2016.) These costs include addiction treatment and opioid-related medical care for individuals, medical care for infants born addicted to opioids, lost productivity and wages, social services including foster care for children whose parents are addicted to opioids, and law enforcement involvement.

An estimated 25 percent of those costs are borne by state and local governments.

Lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry blocked passage of a bill similar to HF 400 in the Minnesota House last year, though it easily passed the Senate. At the time, several companies threatened to stop selling opioid medications in Minnesota in order to kill the bill. This year the outcome was different.

One thing was the same though. Rep. Peggy Bennett voted against both bills.

In her Facebook statement explaining her vote, she said, “Not only will these fee hikes impact the price of necessary opioid products, but could also very well affect the availability of these drugs, which would increase the costs even more for seniors and people who, like my friend, are fighting cancer or other debilitating diseases.”

Rep. Bennett is using the pharmaceutical industry’s scare words.

If Rep. Bennett is truly interested in keeping costs down for cancer patients, drug costs are just the tip of the iceberg. I lost a friend 18 months ago to cancer, and during his one year of treatment, his cancer drugs cost thousands of dollars on a monthly basis. He was able to afford his treatment during the time he survived, but a new study in the American Journal of Medicine found that 42 percent of new cancer patients deplete their life savings during the first two years of treatment. Over half of patients accrue more than $10,000 in debt.

If keeping individuals’ costs down is the abiding concern (rather than protecting pharma profits), we should have a single-payer system so that the expenses of health care are shared by all. We could do this, and hold pharma accountable too. It’s long past time to have a universal health care system in Minnesota. All we have lacked is the political will to move toward a system that puts people over shareholder profits — one that stops draining resources from the have-nots to the benefit of the haves.

No one should have to worry about paying for the health care they desperately need. That should be left to the rest of us, and not by contributing to GoFundMes. (GoFundMe takes 5 percent and credit card companies scrape 3 percent from donations. These companies are making bank from our expensive, broken health care system, and it’s a disgrace that so many people have to rely on these mechanisms to pay for their care.)

Here’s another truth. Rural areas would be the biggest beneficiaries of a universal healthcare system. We are older, sicker, poorer and more disabled. But, ironically, we have the most entrenched opposition to that kind of public policy.

Anti-government rhetoric still has a pretty strong grip in rural America at the moment, and our Republican elected leaders vote against corporate regulation much of the time. This political orientation hasn’t been a boon for most people except for a handful of bigwigs, mostly in the cities where money and human resources (our children) flow to. As economic inequality has widened, rural areas have declined.

We even found out we were vulnerable to losing existing inpatient hospital services in a city of 18,000, because a nonprofit corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating margin made a boardroom decision far removed from the people of this community. We were numbers, not neighbors. Mayo’s leaders did not know our faces, and they did not have to look us in the eye.

The prevailing conservative economic ideology is a surefire way to make our rural communities poorer and more isolated, our countryside emptier and our little cemeteries abandoned to weeds.

Our power as citizens is realized in effective government with capable leadership. Don’t give it away to corporations. Markets are not inherently virtuous, and they do not regulate themselves. The idealization of rugged individualism is a poverty trap for many. For those addicted to opioids because of pharmaceutical companies’ greed, “free markets” can mean death.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.