Half a Decade, Hundreds of Thousands of Lives changed, Health Care, Pharmacy – The Dream Arrives
Posted by: Tim Vasko on Jun 21, 2007 | Under: COPD News and Alerts | (0) Comments
“…and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”
T.S. Eliot
I started thinking about Health Care and Technology back in 2001, not too long after 911, when the world changed forever. Sadness was the order of the day; yet hearts in America and around the world were wide open, perhaps more than ever before in history.
This is when I first heard the story about Grace, an elderly widow who suffered from COPD (respiratory disease). Grace once “had” a nice home in a lovely retirement community in Sun City, Phoenix, AZ, but when I heard her story she was living in a room in the Salvation Army. Grace was now constantly hooked up to oxygen bottles, living in her single bedroom and sparse surroundings; her destructive disease progressing. Grace wasn’t aware that that she could get her health care medications paid for by Medicare - a failure in the system that caused her pain and financial devastation. As her breathing and health deteriorated, she borrowed money against her car and her home (both at one time were fully paid for) to get the medications she needed just to breathe. Spending thousands of dollars per month, she slowly slipped into bankruptcy and into a single room at the Salvation Army. After her financial and physical descent, Grace met the man who told me this story - Gary Rheault.