The Sin of the $3000 Co-Pay

by

My dad is ready to start his cancer treatment. The doctors have decided to start with experimental oral medicine. The side effects sound horrific. What did I expect, the occasional headache and rash? No, the treatment appears as bad as the cancer itself. When he left the doctor’s office this morning and told me the name of the drug and the facts, I couldn’t believe what I heard. This was going to be as awful as I expected. I guess because he’d waited so long since the biopsy, we’d been lulled into a sense of complacency. Whatever he took would be a pill, like a Tylenol, that would magically increase his red blood cells, and he’d feel fine in no time. How could I have been so stupid? It was never going to be that easy. We may have wanted it to be simple, but that was a fantasy. Today, the balloon burst and reality hit home.

I told him this wouldn’t be the kind of medicine he could pick up at CVS or Walgreens. I was right. I hated being right this morning. He called me as he left the doctor’s office.

“You can’t just go by CVS to get this medicine,” he said. “You’ve got to order it and then FedEx it to the doctor’s office. It’s going to take another two weeks.”

I knew this would happen. He’s got cancer, it took almost two weeks from reading the biopsy to get the prescription, and now we’ll wait another two weeks to get this high-powered drug. I didn’t want to gloat about being right, especially when he said that his red blood cell count continued to fall, and the doctor said if it went much lower, he’d need a blood transfusion. The man has no energy. It’s hard to see him unable to do anything without becoming exhausted and fatigued. That’s not my dad. I could hear a sense of desperation in his voice for the first time. When I was there at Thanksgiving, I could tell he was tired. Today, however, I hear despair. This scared me. I don’t quite know why this frightens me.

He told me the co-pay for the medicine would be $3000.00 a year. Let that sink in a moment. I wonder if that despair I heard was him wondering if his life was worth an extra 3000 dollars a year. Sure it is. There’s not a debate. He can afford it. If the starts the medicine now, in this calendar year, he’ll pay 3,000 dollars now and again on January 1st.

Perhaps he, like me, was thinking about those who get their biopsy results, receive a diagnosis, and are told they can take medicine, which will immediately cost $3000.00-$6,000.00, and they hear a death sentence. What do people who can barely afford to live, pay bills, buy gas and food, and pay for their housing do when faced with lymphoma? Do they die slow, painful deaths while insurance companies and the medical-industrial complex take thousands of dollars from those who can afford to pay? Yes, people die like this every day.

Meanwhile, I preach Jesus as the reason for the season and shepherd a church where the most significant issues seem to be the scriptural authority and human sexuality. But, boy, are we wrong. We could be a voice for the voiceless in our pews and community, those marginalized dying who have no resources for life itself. But instead, we fight over the context of two thousand-year-old words in dead languages that are dividing the living faster than cancer cells.

A $3000.00 co-pay for any lifesaving drug is a crime. It is a sin against both God and man. I’m not sure anyone could write a prayer of confession to get humanity off the hook for causing people to choose between life and food, life and rent, life and work, life and children, life and anything. I’m not sure of much of anything anymore. God have mercy on our souls. O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

The Rev. Richard L. Bryant serves as pastor of New Sharon United Methodist Church in Hillsborough, N.C. A graduate of UNC-Greensboro and Duke University, Richard has served churches in England; Raleigh, N.C.; as a missionary in Moscow and Northern Ireland; and in Marshallberg, Ocracoke, Burgaw, and now in Hillsborough. His hobbies include piano performance, storytelling, backyard astronomy, and researching his family’s history.