One the greatest sins of our country is the high price of prescription drugs.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that eight in 10 adults said their prescription drug costs were unreasonable.
Americans spend more per capita on prescription drugs than any other country in the work, the University of California found.
A 2021 study found that Americans pay 2.56 times more for drugs than 32 other comparable countries.
And this isn’t because these drugs make money to produce.
The high prices of these essential medications are because of the greed of pharmaceutical companies,
Studies have found that the research and development costs pharmaceutical companies spend to bring drugs to the market don’t correspond with what these companies charge for their drugs.
They just charge whatever they can get people to pay for them.
Regardless of how it affects the general public, seniors, and the chronically ill.
“Our findings provide evidence that drug companies do not set prices based on how much they spent on R&D or how good a drug is. Instead, they charge what the market will bear,” said senior study author Inmaculada Hernandez, Pharm.D., Ph.D said.
Seniors and those with chronic illness bear the brunt of these out-of-pocket costs spending between $450 and $700 per year just to purchase drugs they need to stay healthy, according to Georgetown University.
This can be a great burden for those on fixed incomes.
Especially with costs rising for necessities everywhere from housing and food to heating and cooling.
Since our government has done little to control these costs, it’s been up to citizens to help their fellow man.
One of these citizens was Air Force Veteran Hody Childress, a farmer and employee at a Lockheed Martin Space facility in a small town called Geraldine, Alabama where Childress lived his entire life.
Childress went to his grave with a secret he kept even from family and friends.
They had no idea he was paying for people’s prescription drug costs until his funeral.
Childress was described as a “humble” man. He loved God and his neighbors
Childress was the kind of man that sent handwritten notes and would share his homegrown veggies with others.
But no one knew that he would donate $100 each month to a local pharmacy to help people who could pay for the full cost of drugs they needed.
In his lifetime, he donated more than $12,000 to help his community while making sure that the pharmacy kept his kind deeds secret.
“He pulled me to the side and said, ‘Do you ever have anybody that can’t pay for their medication?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah, unfortunately, that happens a good bit,” Pharmascist Brooke Walker of town drugs store Geraldine’s.
Childress slid her a folded $100 bill and asked her to use it to help someone in need.
He asked her to tell the recipient that it was “a blessing from the Lord.” Childress came in every month and did the same thing for almost 10 years. The secret was finally revealed when Childress was too ill to make the trip to the drug store himself.
That’s when he asked his daughter to make the trip for him on the first of the month, every month for as long as he lived.
His daughter decided to share the secret at his funeral.
After the service, a staff member from the local high school walked up to personally thank her. Her father helped cover the expense of her son’s $600 lifesaving Epi-pen.
What’s even more incredible is that Childress’ act of kindness will live on. Word of his generous deed spread throughout the community promoting calls to start pouring into the pharmacy offering donations.
“People do care, and there’s hope out there,” Childress’ daughter Tania Nix said.
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Source: YouTube – Good Morrning America, BBC, NPR, The Washington Post
