Can't afford your drugs? Here, have a Band-Aid

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published April 22, 2003

Those Republicans in Tallahassee keep living down, down, down to the stereotype so widely held about them -- that they're mean, cheap and, when it comes to the little guy, pitiless.

Scores of people, many of them old and poor, have been howling for weeks now that they'll die without the financial help of the state's Medically Needy program, which pays their drug and medical bills with a mix of state and federal funds.

This is not melodrama. People with transplanted organs, for instance, need drugs daily so their new organs won't be rejected. Still others need kidney dialysis, or else the toxins that build up in their bodies can kill them within days.

But this has not stopped legislators or the governor.

The Medically Needy program is a tempting pot of money, around $400-million. Last year, the Legislature voted to gut it. A patient will soon have to spend all but $450 of his monthly income before he can get his bills paid. The Legislature did this without paying much attention to who would be hurt. The change was set to take effect this May 1.

Then, as the new session began in Tallahassee, the governor came up with his own idea of the Medically Needy program. Bush was as myopic as the Legislature. He decided the Medically Needy program should pay only for drugs, even though that would lock out the dialysis patients and anybody with a doctor or hospital bill to pay.

This is what you call your basic government-by-the-seat-of-its-pants operation. Late last week, Bush was making noises suggesting he held some particular compassion for the transplant and dialysis patients and would make special arrangements for them. But Monday, Dr. Rhonda Medows, secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration, said she knew nothing about that. Medically Needy recipients would have to survive on $450 a month before the state would pay their bills -- at least between May 1 and July 1, when it is theoretically possible a new plan, born of compromise between Jeb Bush and the Legislature, could be adopted.

In the meantime, if a patient can't live on that $450 -- and who can? -- state social workers will help patients find other sources for their drugs, particularly through programs run by drug companies.

Now think about that. In a state where we lose children under government supervision, we are expecting state workers to get all the prescriptions filled for 27,000 people and do it in less than two weeks.

The Republicans really don't care who they hurt.

Even though officials had had 11 months' lead time, they didn't let patients know until early April that their health benefits were about to be dramatically altered.

And it wasn't until last week that the state established a toll-free number (1-888-419-3456) that the medically needy could call for help -- ranging from what local programs there are to assist them, to what giveaway programs are offered by drug manufacturers.

One of the arguments I've heard in the last week in favor of trimming the Medically Needy program is that Florida's program is very generous compared to other states'. Heaven forbid. We can't be too enlightened, can we?

This argument overlooks the reason why Florida is generous. We are the poor man's paradise, the mecca for the old, the very people the Medically Needy program is designed for. What should we do? Hang signs at the state line telling the poor and the old we've changed our minds and no longer want them?

Stories like these make me understand why conservatives have such contempt for government. But here you have a case of conservatives running the show. They can't even dismantle a program with skill.

-- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.

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