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A version of this article first appeared June 7, 2008, in The Chapel Hill Herald.
"Nobody is further from true wisdom than those people with their grand titles, learned bonnets, splendid sashes and bejeweled rings, who profess to be wisdom's peak." - Erasmus
During a morning broadcast on North Carolina Public Radio, Dec. 28, 2007 to be exact, a North Carolina Blue Cross representative announced that staring in 2008, North Carolina's largest health insurer (Blue Cross) would waive co-payments for generic medications used to treat the most deadly chronic conditions, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. The Blue Cross spokesman (Ron Smith, I believe) also stated that many brand name drugs would also have lower co-payments.
We're a good way through Blue Cross' reduced co-payment promotion (called "Medication Dedication”), which ends in Dec. 2009, and Blue Cross continues to increase co-payments--in some cases by as much as 20 percent--for other medications that have been on the market for at least a decade. As a "non-profit" organization with an annual profit, according to a March edition of the Carrboro Citizen, of nearly $190 million, I guess North Carolina Blue Cross has to continue providing for its CEO, Robert J. Greczyn, whose total compensation in 2006, including an obscene $2.2 million bonus, was $3.1 million (providing Mr. Greczyn with an income of roughly $15,000 per business day).
The primary function of Blue Cross and its administrative partner Medco Health Solutions is not to "drive down the cost of pharmacy health care," as Medco would like to make us think. Every expense that Medco does not cover (and that the patient is responsible for, vis-a-vis the decision of the insurance provider, Blue Cross) Medco profits, and for every cost savings it creates, Dr. William Roper, UNC's Health Care CEO, will be compensated, according to UNC student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, "in cash and Medco stocks, added to the $690,000 he (already) earns from UNC."
And the news of Dr. Roper's appointment to Medco's board, which has gone unreported by the state press, is just the poisoned tip of the sugar-coated pharmacy dagger. Look who else sits on Medco's board, Amazon.com's Director, Myrtle Potter, a consultant and adviser who, through her private firm in Woodside, California, has evidently worked tirelessly to enable Americans "affordable health care." How else can one know how to do this but with experience as a senior executive at Merck & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb and then later as president of commercial operations and chief operating officer of Genentech.
But I'm quite confident the Medco arrangement will be a perfect fit for every politician's "special interest group," the financially strapped American whose family has mounting health care needs. After all, and especially considering how each of the pharmaceutical giants that Potter has managed have figuratively bribed all those impoverished "K Street" law makers who need to return to campaign finance reform school, I'm wondering just how much Merck, Squibb, and Genentech stock she is willing to sacrifice to help Medco - in which she and Dr. Roper own stock--"drive down" the cost of prescription drugs.
In October of 2006, Medco, the largest pharmacy benefit manager in the U.S., "agreed to pay $155 million to settle fraud allegations brought by the federal government and several former company employees." The suit claimed Medco had "canceled and destroyed prescriptions to avoid penalties, sought kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies to promote their medications and paid kickbacks to health insurers in exchange for their business." (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/55006.php)
And income for the competition? Total compensation of former CFO David Colby of WellPoint (Blue Cross licensee in 13 states) was $118 million in 2007, a personal income of $517,566 per business day. Medco and WellPoint are two examples - as U.S. Controller General David Walker stated during a 2006 interview on "60 Minutes" - of why “the biggest threat to the United States is our looming health-care crisis, poised to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury,” for the means to create the happy illusion of caring for your health (all that moola acquired by our non-profit "health-care monarchy") has to come from somewhere ... you and me.
The select few who control the industry--like Medco CEO and Duke University graduate David B. Snow--and who claim to be part of the financial solution (total compensation for Mr. Snow in 2006 was $10 million, $44,300 per business day), are, in a most profound way, part of the problem. Until this issue is resolved, those who are part of any mythical apparatus like Medco, which literally claims to "drive down the costs of pharmacy health care," will be leading the American people nowhere but deeper into crisis.
Health care coverage provided by major North Carolina state dailies? The word "sileni" is understood as being when something on the inside is different than what it appears to be, externally. In "Sileni Alcibiadis," written in 1515, Church reformer and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus recognized that church officials were not the Church, for he knew that these people were only supposed to serve the Church. Rather than mistake the material wealth and power of Church officials for goodness or wisdom, Erasmus thought it best for the Gospel--for the present, ethics--to be more important than allowing leaders to enrich themselves to the financial ruin of those they supposedly help.
Whether it was 500 years ago or today, whether they profess to be concerned for your soul or your health, there are times when the public needs to know when foxes are watching the proverbial hen house.
With the conflict of interest of Medco's board members in mind ... "The better to eat you with, my dear."
John Rhodes is a writer who lives in Efland.
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