A couple of days ago, Allison sent me an email asking if I’d like to participate on a blogger panel discussion about health care reform. Allison knows this issue is a hot button with me, especially since my COBRA countdown clock only has 4 more months remaining. My biological clock is totally defective, but in its place, I have the ever-deafening din of the COBRA clock, tick-tocking away. Not that I wouldn’t still have the same opinions about health care reform, henceforth known as HRC, otherwise, but my current health insurance predicament has just served to underscore my passion and interest in the topic. As if having a chronic disease that will suck the life and financial security out of me weren’t already enough incentive to back HCR.

I had no other plans, other than a date with Jason on the sofa to watch Game 1 of the World Series, which I was bummed about missing, but I figured this was a pretty unique opportunity that wasn’t as amenable to TiVo as a baseball game. I agreed, procured the details, and got myself onto a train to Manhattan with many of my fellow Phillies fans who were headed to the game yesterday afternoon. I missed the train I meant to take since I have that chronically late problem, but luckily the next train was an express that put me into Penn Station only a few minutes later than the train I intended to catch. A cab ride later, and I was on my way up an elevator to drink Diet Coke (how I love diet soda!), eat cheese (how I love cheese!), and talk about our national healthcare trainwreck with an interesting collection of others with a vested interest in the outcome of HCR.

The event itself was the Green Family Foundation Blogger Roundtable on Access to Healthcare. Kimberly Green, President of GFF, spoke about her philanthropy and advocacy work here in the US and in Haiti, and she shared her own experience as a woman living with stage 4 breast cancer. While fortunate to have the financial resources to pick up where her insurance company has abandoned her, as they so often like to do, she knows all too well that most people don’t have the same financial means, so she’s working to make healthcare more accessible. The discussion was moderated by Eve Gittelson, aka NYCEVE from the Daily Kos who is a prominent healthcare blogger and expert, and also one of the forces behind Public Option Please.

I’m still processing what was discussed, and the organizers will be putting together some video, and sharing the website URLs of the various attendees, so I’ll be posting more about it when those pieces fall into place, but there was one issue in particular that I wanted to highlight now since health care reform legislation is moving forward at a pretty good clip, and because it has everything to do with the prescriptions we take. Maybe Lantus, Humulin, Humalog and Novalog ring a bell with you? Unless you’re taking medical advice from people like Khaki Pants and Red Peacoat, medical professionals, and I use that term oh-so-loosely, who quite frankly, I wouldn’t let manage the diabetes of my friend Allison’s newly diagnosed diabetic cat, then you likely take one or more of those insulins.

You see, today’s insulins are part of a category of medications called biogenics which are produced from living organisms. Our favorite gate keeper to life with diabetes, Big Pharma, has conveniently lobbied to attach a little amendment, the Eshoo/Barton amendment, to HCR legislation that’s currently under consideration that would essentially make it forever, give or take a year, until we saw generic versions of the stinky liquid in the glass bottles that keeps us alive. No generic versions of the medications that we’ll be injecting until we take our last breaths mean their pockets will be generously lined for a very long time. As if poking our fingers upwards of 10 times a day to check our BG’s (on test strips that are a dollar a prick no less) weren’t enough bloodletting, they are determined to make sure we’ll be bleeding from our wallets until the end of days too.

We need to contact our lawmakers, and let them know we are not OK with this amendment. We need to let them know that as people with a very expensive life-long chronic disease, we can’t afford to rely on brand name medications for the rest of our lives. This legislation makes no sense to anyone but Big Pharma and the legislators who are in bed with Big Pharma, to be semi-polite about it. Why the heck should these giant corporations with their overpaid executives get so much protection? If anyone deserves some protection, it’s those of us who are stuck managing diabetes every minute for the rest of our lives. Please, read more about this. You can read Eve Gittelson’s assessment, and she provides plenty of additional links so you know what’s up, and just how ridiculous this little amendment is. Please, blog about it, tell your friends and family about it, ask people to call and email their legislators. Tell them we depend on these medications and we can’t afford to maintain the newer generation of insulins as brand names indefinitely.

Edit: Scott at Scott’s Web Log offers a more thorough discussion of the issue of generic biogenics that should be helpful to anyone who wants to communicate with their legislators any concerns about how to facilitate the availability of generic insulins, preventing Big Pharma from continuing to take advantage of our finances without compromising patient safety.