Opiate Crisis: Medicare and Medicaid Throwing Gasoline on the Fire

Opiate Crisis: Medicare and Medicaid Throwing Gasoline on the Fire

Dr. Danny Avula, Health Director, Richmond City Health District
Laura Totty, Director, Henrico Area Mental Health and Developmental Services
Edward Senter Jr., Fire and EMS chief Chesterfield County
Col. David Hines, Sheriff, Hanover County
Thomas A. Silvestri, RTD president/publisher

Consider the math of the above prescription: 90 opiate pills at a cost of $3.40 to the Medicaid patient, or about four cents each. On the street, they sell for $20 to $30 each.

More than once, I transported someone to a Medicaid doctor who wrote a script for opiates which were then purchased at a national pharmacy. One patient readily laughed at her faking her pain at the doctor's office. She also related how the doctor was angry because she would not lose weight: She said her fat was her meal ticket. She said she would keep five pills for herself and sell the rest at $20 to $30 per pill.

In effect, Medicaid was providing her with between $1800 and $2700 in non-taxed income along with free medical healthcare at taxpayers' expense. Why get a job like taxpayers when you have a monthly stipend with healthcare and groceries?

For investigative reasons and for a limited time, I daily or bi-daily taxied a pill-popper to one of five different homes where she bought a "Perk" for $20 to $30. In addition, at other times, the buy locations were gas stations and convenient stores, locations tracked down with free Obama phones. Convenient stores run by immigrants are not only a rendezvous place for drug transactions but a source of cash for the drug buys: EBT cards can be used as debit cards for 50% cash of phony grocery purchases.

The reader must not miss the hidden meaning of this: Some or many welfare parents are spending their childen's EBT food funds on drugs. EBT cards are de facto debit cards with monthly re-charges of $300 or more. (A Perk fan and convenient store customer, one mother with five kids monthly received close to $1000 from taxpayers.)

The do-gooder naive presidential candidates (or hypocrites), who want to give more money to welfare recipients, need to realize that they will merely cause inflation of drug costs in the projects. These Democrats are drug dealers' candidates-of-choice.

One must learn and remember that help that does not help the helpless to self-help is not really help. Non-productive welfare reproduces human misery. Feeding starving people is not help if they practice raw procreation between food deliveries. The road to hell is paved with good intentions from bad values. Morality without practicality is immoral.

While this underground opiate cancer among the welfared is disturbing, it is nothing compared to the larger middle-class opiate mess which is grounded in its own legal entitlement. The manufacture of opiates should be banned for both the poor and rich. Grandpa got thru life and surgery without opiates.

Opiates are a saltwater solution where the original problem is worsened by a problem solution like a thirsty person drinking saltwater. Opiates may reduce some individuals' battle with pain while society loses a much larger war metastasized by their use. Their physical addiction is mirrored in the mental addiction wrought by social media. Both are examples of people wanting something-for-nothing: Bliss without solving problem.

Opiates are also like humanity's addiction to fossil fuels which save time today while destroying our future due to a worsening global holocaust. Hitler killed millions with Zyklon-B. Petrophiliacs' holocaust will kill billions with greenhouse gases.

[About the writer: A famous philosopher once said that one could not understand and cure hunger without having known hunger. Hunger is not missing a meal, but missing meals on a regular, daily basis. Taking this to heart, one cannot understand the homeless unless one casts off the lifelines and lives like a homeless person as this homeowner did for over a year in early 2000s in a city 1200 miles from Richmond. This "walk-a-mile-in-the-shoes" exercise was the essence in understanding discrimination as described in "Black like me" where a white journalist dyed his skin to travel thruout the South in 1961 to better understand racial discrimination. The above opiate details were garnered from becoming a friend to a single-mom who the writer helped become a college student as a way out of the Projects.]