Inflation Has Nearly 100 Million Americans Skipping Medical Treatment

A third of Americans say they’ve cut back on medical care and prescription drugs because they simply can’t afford it anymore. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

link - https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/05/98-million-us-skipped-treatment-or-cut-back-essentials-pay-healthcare-year

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A third of Americans say they've cut back on medical care and prescription drugs because they simply can't afford it anymore. So people are not just splitting their pills in half. They're saying I can't, I, I can't eat three meals a day. I can't drive as much. I, I've got to be able to cut back even on things like groceries in order to pay for the pill that I've already cut in half just to stay alive.
The reason this story is so important is not because it's just another, our healthcare is broken story. It's because we are seeing headline after headline right now telling us that the economy is kicking. That everything Biden has done, everything's great. Unemployment is down. Gas prices are coming down. This is the same thing that happened in that recovery that we saw when Obama first took office that wasn't a recovery at all. It was a recovery for Wall Street.
Yeah.
It was a recovery for corporations. People are struggling and they cannot meet their needs and the media is telling us that the economy is fixed right now.
Well, for the media, it is.
Yeah.
Because the media is so tied into Wall Street, everything. I mean, there's not. Look, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, you name it, ABC, they're all owned and operated by corporate America. So as they see the stock market go up, as they see things stabilize on Wall Street, they make the assumption that that's good for mom and pop. Where mom and pop are out there, this is a Gallup poll, that they say 100 million people, 100 million have skipped medical care that they need, some of them to even stay alive, because they can't pay for it right now. So you can have, you can have the Republicans and the Dems saying, oh, everything's great now. We're in good shape. Not according to these, to this study.
Well, and these are the kinds of things that the Democratic party needs to be paying attention to as we get closer to the midterms, because if they're gonna go out there and try to sell us on this Biden's fixed the economy thing, you've got a hundred million people right here that are looking at their bank accounts and they're saying, no, he didn't.
How about the vic, how about the victory declaration on the last bill that we saw coming through, the climate.
Yeah, the IRA, yeah.
Yeah. That now we're gonna, Medicare finally has the ability to negotiate with drug companies. No, that is total bull. They don't have the right to negotiate with companies except for a hundred, was it a hundred medicines?
I, I, I think it's, it's.
Less than that.
It's in the double digits. I've, I've seen some as low as 10.
Yeah.
Is some of the numbers I've seen, like maybe only 10 drugs.
Yeah.
And those price changes wouldn't even go into effect, I think until 2026.
Yeah.
So four years down the road, 10 drugs might be slightly cheaper.
Well, not only that, the, the nego, you can't even negotiate unless the drug has been on the market for 12 years.
Right.
There, it's a nothing. It is a nothing into, this accomplishes nothing.
It's a victory on paper.
Yeah.
And that's all it is.
But we've got 'em out there, oh boy, we've, we've really pushed back the pharma industry, haven't we? We've really delivered. Put, put a guy like Bernie Sanders in there and you see what delivery looks like. That's the sad thing about this story. They're making stuff up. The truth is, if you got a guy that believes like Bernie Sanders, things really get done. That's, that's the whole difference here. And that's, that's I think, I think that's the thing that people are having to struggle with.
Yep.
They have to watch the smoke and mirrors rather than reality. Thank you for joining me. Okay.
Thank you.
That's all for this week.

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