This is what she needs from you. It is not useless.
Praying for you both.
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I am reminded of stories of surgeons with a God complex. LOL
It seems very similar to God of the gaps thinking – something attributed to God until science reveals the machinery to us so we can fix it. To be sure we only had prayer when such means were beyond our understanding. But why should turning to God when it is beyond our ability translate to not allowing ourselves to fix things when this is no longer the case?
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I agree. Looking at a suffering child may be heartbreaking and if it is your own child, it feels even worse. The parent would do whatever (s)he can to remove the suffering and heal the child.
Praying is the natural Christian reaction to such a situation. If the child does not get healed in that moment, parents use whatever additional means there are to help their suffering child. Or a suffering wife, relative, friend.
If an operation or gene therapy can fix the problem, it is good to use that method, if it is available. Thanking God for the possibility to get such help and praying that God would guide the hands of the operating doctors. We should think carefully before we demand that God must give His help in the way I want. It seems that God uses humans as messengers and helpers when possible.
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They can be compensated by the donations along with other sources, but money donated for research should not be used for company profit. They have a profit margin that is set based on the cost of research and production of the drugs, right? So I am just hoping the donations are not included when counting the cost, which would then inflate the drug price.
No, I’m saying the donations are not a cost that should be recovered by the drug company when setting drug prices… It did not cost them anything to accept a donation. Donations should not be used to increase the price of the drug.
Just throwing this in AI, it appears that donations may only be about 15%, while investments are about 75%. The remaining may then be self or government funded.
If someone has the money out of pocket to spend for an expensive drug, more power to them. But what about the insurance company deciding to cover it? The pharmaceutical company and their investors make profit while everyone’s insurance premiums skyrocket. Hmm… maybe the percentage of research that can come from investments should be limited somehow.
Do we need this new drug for pancreatic cancer? Its for someone that has been irresponsible in taking care of their own health. Regular checkups can catch it early on and be treated with surgery, chemotherapy, etc.
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Indeed!
I have always been very suspicious of the addition of middle men making profits like this. I cannot help feel that this is somehow ultimately responsible for rising medical costs. And now we see people inventing insurance to pay for other things like car repair. Do we want the same thing to happen to all our costs for everything?
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It really gets complicated when the drug management companies get in between the manufacturers and the consumer as well. They also take a big cut.
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This brings me back to thoughts regarding insurance (at least in the U.S.). Something that is on other peoples’ minds as well.
My family has very good insurance, and we have needed it, especially when our oldest daughter was very ill as a child. She had numerous, absolutely required, life-threatening surgeries, an army of doctors and nurses, 8/12 weeks in hospital in ICU, over a year of physical and occupational therapy, “optional” plastic surgeries - 10? I’ve lost track - to regain some facial function, continuing follow- ups with her main 3 specialists, additional follow ups with other specialists and therapists to try to improve residual problems.
There is absolutely now way that we could have paid for even half of this out of pocket. Families with sick kids, who have mediocre, lousy, or no insurance would have had to reject all but the life-saving care, and then pay for it for the rest of their lives. And hope no one else in the family gets sick.
My daughter will be going off our insurance in the next few years. Her ongoing needs will not disappear.
Pooling resources in a bet that I or someone in my family will eventually need to pay for health care, which is the basic idea of insurance, makes sense and seems essential to me. But the way we go about it here in the US, and all the hands that get to make demands on those pools of money make the system work well only for those who can afford to use it.
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You are so right. Some of the irony is that if you are very poor, you will qualify for Medicaid, and have access to care, but if you are part of the working poor and have jobs without insurance, you are stuck with the bills. As a result of the Medicaid problem, a lot in that group use the ER as their primary care doctors, and drive costs up, as it is difficult to obtain primary care on Medicaid, plus there is really no disincentive to going to the ER for non-emergent care.
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I asked an insurance guy about that once and he was actually embarrassed by the fact that his income depended on spending money paid for health care on him. But he pointed to the system and asked, “Yet what can I do?”
I don’t know what you mean by “drug management companies”. There’s the manufacturers, who are also the sellers, and there’s the insurance outfits.
The expansion of urgent-care facilities thanks to laws passed under Obama has helped greatly in that respect. At the ER it’s generally a few hundred just to walk in the door, at urgent care that’s zero.
BTW, at the Adventist hospital here, the urgent care folks may decide you need to be in the ER, but since they’re sending you over that first few hundred doesn’t happen (though I think there’s a like $20 fee for the techs to wheel you over).
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But if you are on Medicaid, there is no cost to the consumer, other than their time. As a result, if you can get in quicker at the ER than you can at the local clinic, you use the ER inappropriately. Of course, some ERs triage you and sent you to the attached urgent care walk in clinic, but while they are still collecting the money from the government, they often make more for an ER visit. Then, there is additional problem of legal liability. If the ER sends someone to the urgent care, then they have a bad outcome, then they get sued, even though it may have been a reasonable decision.
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You are probably unaware they are separate from the insurance companies, although some are vertically integrated. The problem is that they are contracted with by the insurance companies, and are really the ones controlling prices and drugs. The insurance companies just pay the bills, and collect the premiums. From the internet, I would read about their business model to get a good idea of what they do and why it is a problem.
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So with my last job, the medical insurance premiums were about $800 per pay for the family plan. Thats almost a mortgage payment at $1,600 per month. I was like, no thank you, and we got a good deal on market place insurance through an insurance broker. Thats a middle man that can help. The cost is only $600 per month and covers what we need.
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We don’t see that Insurance Methodology is the secular answer to the Replacement of giving to the Church and the Church manages who really needs help. Also the People may not want to commit Fraud to the Church like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5.
Aaah. This explains a lot! I wondered about some of the recent, really strange (to me) changes related to my prescriptions.
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In my experience, though it can seem that care will never emerge it usually does though it may take hours. 
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My wife is the age your mom was when she passed and is probably more riddled with illnesses than anyone else I know, just not one specific one that is obviously going to be the last straw. But she is not at all a believer and seemingly would rather be alive the maximum number of days possible to avoid the abyss. But she works hard to preserve her heath and avoid running off the tracks. Walks in earnest everyday having replaced both knees over the last year, consults with a dietician and restricts her diet appropriately for her stage 4 kidney disease while also receiving aphaeresis monthly. Her mother didn’t quite live quite so long as she has so far and her father died at 96. We both assumed she wouldn’t make it as long as them way back when but at this point I think she has a real chance of catching her dad. Maybe fear is useful?
I do wish she had a sense of being part of something greater. I talk to her about such things as much as she is wiling but mostly I’m happy to enjoy the extra innings she is earning even though we both have to contribute to that effort. Myself, I don’t fear death though my parents were not as long lived as hers so God only nows what sort of genes I’m packing.
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Sorry for her, and your, struggle, but glad you both find joy in the midst of it. The pictures of your garden remind me a bit of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are getting a bit long in the tooth! Age is hitting me and my spouse as well. Doctor visits and funerals tend to fill our social calendar.
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Yes the closest we have to a social group is Lia’s old walking group of women artists the Jabberwalkies. We’ve lost four of them to funerals and are worried about both halves of another couple in which his physical health is bad and her mental health is at least abnormal for her. Makes me think of this animated explanation of life. I wonder if you’d seen it before? It needs a trigger warning in that where it talks about losing out to entropy and rejoining the dead universe it just had to add “dead forever”. Seems a little gratuitous to me.
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Nice video. Actually seems to reflect some of what the Bible says in that we should not worry about tomorrow, but live today as it comes.