Malign neglect: Corporate greed and personal tragedy

Two weeks ago tonight I went into our next door neighbor's apartment to check on him. He had started drinking again the week before but this time he had fessed up and checked himself into the hospital after a few days. He got out of the hospital a week later. The doctors had finally stabilized his heart, but not before finding one more medical condition, this one unrelated to his life-long struggle with alcoholism and depression. We had family visiting when he got out and he said he was not up to socializing yet and just wanted to rest up over the weekend, when he knew we would be away at a school reunion.

We worried about him over the weekend. The end of summer was a dangerous time since it meant that the days were getting darker and his drug benefits were about to run out for the year. We and his other friends routinely "lent" him money for prescriptions in the fall but he was keenly aware of dependence on this charity. He fretted endlessly about being a burden on us and nothing we could say could change the situation. And of course the new diagnosis meant yet another regimen of expensive drugs.

Our worries were well-founded. Two weeks ago tonight I opened the door and found his body in the bathtub, where he had bled to death from self-inflicted wounds.

I know that many Republicans are very generous with their individual charity but they seem unable or unwilling to see that by subjugating the needs of the ill and disabled to the profits of the pharmaceutical companies, they are robbing millions of their human dignity -- and even of their lives.