She held the box of pills in front of my face, close enough to steal them. I have never seen a pharmacist do that in the USA, where medicines are stored many feet away from the pharmacy counter, far from the reach of customers who might be desperate enough to grab them.
“Veinte mil colones,” the pharmacist told me. Twenty thousand colones, or $30. The same medication cost $117 in the US, and that was why I typically rationed my pills. I asked if I should bring in my old bottles to transfer the prescriptions.
“No prescription is necessary,” she replied. My heart jerked in my chest as she said it. No way did I hear that right, so again I asked in halted Spanish. She confirmed, no prescription was necessary for either medicine I was seeking.
Together, they cost $50. In the US, they cost over $200.
Outside the pharmacy, I enjoyed the warmth swelling in my eyelids. Warm relief throbbed in my chest and face as I sat on a wooden bench. “Utterly broken, and working as intended,” I reflected on the US health failure system.
Why is it that we require prescriptions for most medicines in the US? Because a sick, desperate population will remain loyal to their jobs when health insurance is part of their compensation. It is a control mechanism that operates on fear.
If medicine is easy to obtain, devoid of bureaucratic hoops and high prices, we feel free to change jobs or not to work for some rich person at all.
Thank you for sharing that experience. I hope more folks are able to learn from this and have similar experiences to understand that there are other worthwhile and effective alternatives to the systems and structures that exist in the US. American exceptionalism is a crutch.