Comments on: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

By: Cavalcade of Risk: Come to the Carnival « The Sentinel Effect

Cavalcade of Risk: Come to the Carnival « The Sentinel Effect — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:58:07 +0000

[...] at Colorado health Insurance Insider writes about Angelina Ortiz, who has asthma and requires meds costing [...]

By: Louise

Louise — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:26:01 +0000

Thanks for your thoughts Glyph. I must admit, I too was skeptical of the $1200/month drug cost described in the story I cited. I’m not in the medical profession, but I work with insurance underwriting issues every day, and asthma comes up quite often. I have never had a client with more than about $400/month in Rx expenses for asthma. But since the story said $1200, I had to go with that for this article.
When I thought more about it, I decided that it didn’t really matter if the drug expense was exact for this patient – because it could easily be the case for a number of other conditions. The point I was making is that when someone has a disease that is beyond their control (ie, not related to being obese or tobacco use, etc.) and requires very expensive care, that person automatically has fewer opportunities in life than those of us who are healthy. Something worth thinking about.

By: Glyph

Glyph — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 02:19:28 +0000

As a resident, I’m racking my brain as to what combination of asthma medicines alone could amount to 1200 a month, I even got some old books out to try to jog my memory. She must be on 2 or more new serious inhalers (advai e.g), but even then I don’t think those run more than 300 a month. And the basic asthma stuff like albuterol and ipratroprium don’t cost much. I’m skeptical about the costs thrown about in this story.

But life is not fair. Not every playing field in life is level and I’m not sure you should take from others to try to level them all.