Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Editorials: A boon to the sickly poor
ILL-HEALTH is a common bedfellow of our people who reside in the countryside.
They belong to more than half a billion people who “live on just under a dollar a day, which is the definition of poverty.”
When falling seriously ill, the poor have no way of seeking medical help, unless they go to private practitioners or to district hospitals. Either way, they need cash, which they don’t have.
Really, the most significant deterrent to the average rural inhabitant’s seeking medical attention is poverty.
Although they are used to a life of deprivation, when they fall ill, they yearn for medical help.
But the lack of financial wherewithal bars them from going to medical clinics or district hospitals.
They could not even buy over the counter the medicines.
New law
This reality of extreme poverty is a circumstance that the Cheap Drugs Law will try to correct by extending a warm public hand of recognition to the millions of our impoverished citizenry.
Note that the more than 45 percent of our population lives below the poverty line, constituting 60 percent of our working class.
Thus, it is the majority of the nation’s work force that will be benefited by a cheap medicines law.
That the law should have been enacted long before is proof of the lack of populist orientation on the part of our lawmakers, majority of which have elitist outlooks, although a growing percentage have shown strong middle class motivations.
Passage
Truth is, there was a moment when sponsors of the cheaper medicine bill was about to give up, suspecting that the falling out of the bill’s supporters indicated a strong lobby from the leaders of the pharmaceutical industry against the passage of the bill in late 2007.
The original bill would later become the anchor of a substitute bill, the version that became subject of compromise, and passed.
The issue over the original bill concerned the medical prescriptions that drug manufacturers would like to stay favorable to them.
They want the “branded name” of their products to appear on the prescription rather than just the generic name.
But the President stepped in, had the health department “relax its proposal for doctors to write only the generic names of medicines prescribed.”
