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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today promised that the government health care plan under consideration now in Congress will put an end to what she called “diagnosis discrimination” — the practice of doling out medicine based on a physician’s opinion about a medical condition.
“Under the president’s health plan, meds will get distributed equally regardless of ability to pay, or diagnosis,” said Ms. Sebelius. “The system we inherited that provided the most expensive drugs only to those who had a particular elite set of diseases is a vestige of the days when most health insurance was sold to people who paid for it, or who had the dumb luck to work for a company that offered it as a benefit.”
An unnamed spokesman for the pharmaceutical industry embraced the provision, noting that “providing equal doses of all the major branded drugs for each U.S. resident would also create or save untold thousands of jobs.”
Sebelius said, “For too long the federal government has treated many medications as niche privileges, and if you didn’t come from the right neighborhood where they get the right kinds of ailmentsÉwell, you just didn’t get that drug. It’s really a civil rights issue.”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said this morning, “The president sees ending ‘pharma-scrimination’ as the most urgent priority of this Tuesday mid-morning.”
“If the congressional subcommittee fails to approve the equal meds provision before dinner at the latest,” said Gibbs, “America will face the greatest pharmaceutical crisis since before the discovery of penicillin.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the family-friendly news satire site.
