“I’m so sick from this COVID,” Jacqueline Smith cried over the telephone. “I don’t have $952!”
On Sunday, Smith, a Sun-Times subscriber who lives on the North Side, had written to the metro desk:
“Dear Sir or Madam,” she began. “I’m 85 years old and somehow caught COVID-19. I’ve tested Saturday and when I went to get a prescription filled for Paxlovid I was told it would cost me $1,450. The cheapest I could get it from two pharmacies was $950. I am on living on my [Social Security] check every month. I have no savings. I’m supporting my mentally disabled daughter also. … I called Medicare to find out why it’s not covered but they aren’t available on weekends so someone is calling me back on Monday, hopefully. Can you help me find out what is going on with this? I’m desperate.”
Among the many uses of a newspaper — news, puzzles, filler for packing boxes — is court of last resort for the desperate. The city desk forwarded the email to our consumer reporter, who was on vacation. She passed it back to an editor, who nodded at me. Among my several functions is to be the paper’s free safety, lurking in the backfield, ready to tackle any story that slips past my sturdier colleagues.
First, call her.
“I don’t know if Trump canceled …” Smith said, quite upset. “Maybe he did something where people can’t get Paxlovid for COVID.”
I said I’d see what I could find out. Nothing online about Medicaid refusing to pay for Paxlovid, the drug used to squash COVID in its early stage. If this were a thing, as the kids say, something probably would be there. Though perhaps this is the vanguard in the fast-moving destruction of the government over the past month.
Next call, her physician, Dr. Ariel Katz — I identified myself to the nurse and said why I was calling. She hung up without a word. I phoned back and went straight to voicemail. Far be it for me to lecture a doctor. But remember the Bible story about being kind to strangers, lest one be an angel in disguise. Or a newspaper columnist ready to question the professionalism of your office in print.
I had better luck with her pharmacy, at the Mariano’s on Halsted.
“Her insurance on Medicare wanted something ridiculous,” Mariano’s friendly pharmacist, said. But it isn’t that Medicare won’t cover it. “Other patients have gotten Paxlovid; Medicare completely covers it. The problem might have been her deductible.”
So not a societal issue, but something particular to this reader. That happens. Many, as Thoreau neatly put it, “mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”
Or is it? This is where time helps. A situation sometimes has to mellow for the news to rise to the surface. The next morning, the part of the above that represents a significant development we will see across the country in the days, weeks and months to come occurred to me. Let’s play, “Be the Reporter” — can you spot it?
It’s the uncertainty, the “I don’t know” part. Not knowing whether your medicine is still covered or if there is anyone still employed in the right department to help you — an issue already, on our health care system’s most efficient day, now made far worse by Donald Trump and Elon Musk ripping out the guts of federal agencies and flinging them over their shoulders like toddlers going at a low china cabinet, slashing programs that help regular Americans so tax breaks can be given to billionaires.
“The whole nation is anxious and that includes older people, especially these Medicaid cuts,” said Dr. Naoko Muramatsu, a professor in the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for Health Equity in Cognitive Aging. “Whether you can get this coverage, whether this procedure is covered, that kind of thing has been always there. The new thing is uncertainty about anything that involves federal funding.”
Of course, anxiety is only the beginning of the real cuts hurtling toward us. I also reached out to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, and they sent me a study, hot off the presses Wednesday, with the ominous title, “Medicaid’s Impact in Illinois: What We Stand to Lose.”
Short answer: A lot.
A little more than a quarter of the state — 3.4 million Illinoisans — are enrolled in Medicaid; 44% of those are children. Medicaid pays for two-thirds of all nursing home days and half of all births.
If the Republican cuts go through, nearly a quarter of Illinois Medicaid recipients — 770,000 people — will lose their coverage entirely by the end of the fiscal year. Over the next decade, Illinois will lose up to $39 billion in federal Medicaid funding, throwing those costs back to the state and cutting benefits.
As both a new Type 1 diabetic and someone trying to navigate health care for his aged parents, I can tell you there is a double whammy to illness —the deprecation of the sickness itself, plus the Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to line up prescriptions, doctor’s appointments, rehab facility beds, medical transportation. Sometimes it’s a toss-up as to which is worse.
The good news: When I checked back with Jackie Smith, while she didn’t get Paxlovid, her condition had improved.
“I’m doing better,” she said. She had prepared an enticing asparagus casserole with three types of cheeses for dinner. She had survived COVID before, not to forget four cancer surgeries, three bouts of chemo and seven, count ’em, seven marriages.
I had to ask: Why so many marriages? She told me she had spent her career as a flight attendant for international airlines — Air France, TAP Air Portugal, Royal Jordanian — and while your boyfriend couldn’t fly for free, your spouse could. “So whoever I was dating, we ended up getting married.” she said. “Marry me and see the world.”
So she is used to turbulence. We’d all better strap in. It’s going to be a bumpy flight.