Viagra: Obamacare Price Increase Signals Population Decline

I believe you can measure the cost of Medicare with Viagra. When Viagra goes up, medical care costs go up. When Viagra goes down, medical care costs come down.

Not that I take Viagra, of course. A guy like me doesn’t need Viagra. But what I’ve noticed is that for a long time, it was about $5 a pill. You’d need a prescription. You could get all you wanted, although insurance did not pay for it.

Then, suddenly, the cost rose to $10 a pill, just like that. The same pill, the same ingredients. At the same time, other medical costs shot up. They’re all linked up to this pill, as I said.

I looked into still getting it at $5 a pill. You could do it by mail from Canada. But this is an intimate item, Viagra, something you want to know is real. How can you believe it’s real without an actual smiling pharmacist assistant handing it to you? From Canada? Home of the North West Mounted Police? Maybe it would make your nose grow, or your feet swell up.

So I stuck to having my doctor call it in to my pharmacy here in the Hamptons. I’d get embarrassed going there for it, off course, asking for my Viagra from a woman assistant pharmacist, but it would work if I came at an odd hour, when it wasn’t busy.

Then, Obamacare became the law of the land. What would happen? One part of Obamacare was to get everybody having medical care. But another part said that with more competition, prices would go down. My doc phoned in the prescription for 10 for a month, as usual. I waited. Then I went in just before closing and got in line. When my turn came, the pharmacist told me that my medical insurance would now be paying for it. I said, that’s great, let’s do it.

“But you can only get three pills,” she said.

“Huh?” I said. There were now people in line behind me. I hoped she wouldn’t actually say the V word. This was going to be a conversation.

“Through your medical insurance, you can only get three Viagra pills at a time. That’s the maximum. It’s good for 15 days. So if you go through your insurance company, you have to come in again in 15 days.”

This didn’t make much sense. It meant I’d be making these embarrassing trips to Rite Aid a lot. But then, insurance was paying for it. Wasn’t it? Was there a co-pay?

“The co-pay for each Viagra pill is $20,” she said. That was twice as much as I paid before.

“Well then, I will get 10 pills without insurance. That would be $10, as it’s been, right?”

“Without insurance, each pill is now $50. It went up. Ten pills is $500. Shall I ring it up?”

“But this was just $10 last month.”

“Not anymore.”

The people behind me were getting restless.

“That’s a five-fold increase.”

“Yes.”

“And with a prescription, there is a three-pill maximum? Why is that?”

“They just changed it. I don’t know.”

“Have they just discovered there’s something dangerous about a guy taking more than three pills every 15 days? Is that the problem?”

She gave me this look. It said: “Don’t get personal with me, buster.”

I turned around to look at the people behind me. One woman was looking at her watch.

“Viagra, Viagra, Viagra,” I snarled at them. I got the three pills. She charged me $60.

Before Obamacare, it’s $5 a pill without insurance, then doubles to $10 a pill. After Obamacare it’s up five times to $50 a pill. It’s the same pill. This is progress?

So 15 days go by, and if I had been using Viagra, which I wasn’t, as I said, I would have spaced them out to use them judiciously, and so I would need a refill. But if the max was three, could it have refills? Who knew? Maybe I’d need another prescription. I called the drugstore.

“No, it’s three pills every 15 days through the insurance,” she said. “And it renews. But as I said, I could still give you all of them, all seven at once, if you need all that many right away. But you’ll have to pay the $50 a pill.”

What it comes down to is that Obamacare is messing with our sex lives. Bingo, it’s five times as expensive. A luxury item. That knocks out a lot of regular folks. There’s going to be a lot of irritable, frustrated and testy regular people out there. As for the rich, you can have your 10 or even 60 Viagras a month, if you can get a prescription for those amounts. Pop a pill every 12 hours? It’ll cost you $3,000 a month. But so what?

Isn’t this just what’s happening in America? The rich get fancy cars, you get Corollas. The rich vacation in San Tropez, you visit the relatives in Tennessee. And as the years roll by the great divide between rich and poor widens.

Obviously, there are going to be consequences. Less Viagra means fewer babies. Among the poor, the American population will decline. Among the rich, it will speed up. But isn’t that, when all is said and done, what’s best for America? There will be more rich kids, all better educated at private and Ivy League schools, all better equipped to run the country. They will know where Greenland is on the map. They will know what is the capital of Serbia and who is the Prime Minister. They will be better leaders. And they will be happier and more satisfied too.

And there’s crime. Wasn’t it Willie Sutton who said he robbed banks because that was where the money is? Now sexually unsatisfied burglars, desperate, will be into the medicine chests of the rich, at night when nobody is home. This is going to go right through the roof.

I write this article for those of you who use Viagra, which, as I said, I don’t. And don’t forget, if you have an erection that lasts more than four hours, call a doctor.