I GO to Mercury Drug each week, and each time I see these faces, queuing in front of the counter with a look that is both hesitant and indignant but ultimately resigned and begging for some small comfort they know will never come from the pharmacist staring them down.
They stand there, holding a piece of paper in one hand and a worn-down purse (they may as well use a plastic bag) in the other, sad, helpless, like they’re clawing through straws, furious, trying to climb up, though they probably know they’re grabbing at nothing but air. They seem to me like they’re drowning in air.
They’re the poor who, already deep in debt trying to make ends meet with a budget of less than a hundred a day for an oversized, very extended family of 12, has had, by some cruel trick of fate, to deal with a father or a husband or a grandparent who has tuberculosis or an aneurism.
So, they line up in a drugstore with money borrowed from a loan shark or charged against their future salaries, so they can buy that antibiotic or pill that costs as much as a week’s worth of the food they are already in short supply of.
Call me emotional, but I think the biggest lie Big Pharma is making us swallow is that we don’t deserve to live if we can’t pay up because good health – with all the research and marketing that go into it – costs money.
I took my son once for an asthma attack to the emergency room of Makati Med – I think the guys at the hospital call that area the “pit” (or maybe I’m just watching too much of Grey’s Anatomy). As I waited while my son was being treated, I eavesdropped on a conversation between three residents and a frail, small woman sitting on a chair, held up by a pair of oversized slippers.
She was staring blankly into a wall. Her husband was on life support in a nearby cubicle – his lung eaten up by cancer after years of smoking – and the residents were trying to explain to her that while they can keep her husband breathing, there will be no point in doing that because there was no chance he’ll be waking up again anyway.
But she just kept repeating: “Can’t you do anything more? He’s my husband. He’s the only one earning for us.”
Finally, a snooty woman – maybe the head nurse – cut in and told her bluntly and rather crassly, “You won’t be able to afford it if we keep him breathing here.”
There was a time when there were great physicians and chemists who worked there asses off without hardly any compensation, so they could find a cure to a plague or an illness that was decimating mankind. Now, it seems all they do is find a wonder drug so they could earn billions and keep their shareholders happy.
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Business for motley fools like us. I’m no economics expert – I’m a philosophy major, by the way, and I didn’t even graduate – but I’ve been editing business stories for more than a decade that I feel confident enough to cut through the techno-crap that floats around in business sections like this one like weed pollen in the morning.
I’ve made it my vocation to make business stories as understandable as movie gossip to the watchman sitting slack-jawed beneath spotty fluorescent bars deep in the night ringing a random number hoping to hear a light, girly voice at the other end of the line.
Here’s one gobbledygook we can sink our teeth in today. The central bank wants to mop up P50 billion in excess liquidity to keep inflation benign.
Crap, right? Well, that bit of news simply means that the central bank – the demigods who tell banks what to do – thinks there’s too much money floating around that it wants to keep some of it in its vaults, so it won’t drive prices up.
You see, those companies that make products we consume think that when there’s too much money floating around, it’ll be perfectly all right for them to drive their prices up, so they can get a piece of the action.
Of course, fools like us don’t really get to see – much less touch – all that money. The closest thing our dirty hands will ever get to touch it is if we have a relative working abroad who’s sending us all the dollars they earn.
Part of that “excess liquidity” the central bank is talking about are remittances from the country’s huge army of migrant workers. Most of it goes to stocks, bonds and capital that do create new businesses and jobs for us. Eventually, all that money is going to trickle down to us down the food chain. Maybe just enough for a can of sardines, but It’s not a bad thing, really.
What the central bank is just trying to do is protect us from all those greedy bastards trying to filch our already cash-deprived pockets by jacking up the prices of our shampoos, detergent, cell phone load, baby formula and instant noodles.
So, here’s a glass to those boys at the central bank who don’t really get paid all that well but gets a kick out of scaring the living hell out of all the bad guys trying to make our lives even more miserable by telling us we don’t deserve to live because we can’t pay up.
