How to do what’s wrong right
Dear Howard,
I’ve seen an ad on TV hosted by Bono claiming that for just 40 cents a day, we can save a person in Africa living with AIDS. Only 40 measly pennies? Then why in the heck do my meds in Texas cost me, monthly, more than $1,500? For what logical reason does it cost me more to stay alive than it costs the pizza joint I work for to maintain its fleet of automobiles while some dude in Zambia pays almost nothing? Something isn’t right! — Seth Daniel Jarvis
Dear Seth,
Simply put, our government’s blithe insouciance toward medical price controls is responsible for your astronomical drug costs; and for reasons that are utterly mystifying, Americans will not rise up, en masse, to protest the unholy prices of their meds. Why are there still no HIV meds currently available in the U.S. in generic form? A patent only lasts seven years — yet, antiretroviral meds first came on the market back in 1996. Every gay person in the U.S. should write his/her representative asking why the injustice of monopolized, prescription price-kiting is allowed to continue; when people do, it’ll change.
Of course what this means is: the populations of the continents of Africa and Asia only pay $4/day because that’s what HIV drugs truly cost to manufacture.
Seth, if you’re having difficulty affording your prescriptions, ADAP (the AIDS Drug Assistance Program) is a federal/state-level undertaking for those with HIV to gain access to antiretroviral medications (who cannot otherwise afford them); and the Ryan White Program is the single largest federal-level support initiative accomplishing the same goal. To learn more, visit NASTAD.org or KFF.org/hivaids.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 18, 2014.