By: Harrison Chang

Nowadays, people are willing to abandon their conscience just for money and status .In hospitals, the pharmacists and factories that produce medications are increasing the prices of medications that could save thousands of lives.

According to West Health, more than 1.1 million people died among Medicare recipients due to the inability to afford their necessary medications. Although drugmakers aren’t suddenly raising the prices as they did in 2019, they continue to steadily increase the price by four percent a year. The pressure of affording these medications is breaking down the patient’s family members bit by bit. In extreme cases, the pressure might get so high that it crushes the patient’s desire to survive and causes them to take their own lives.

Many people are holding protests to fight for cheaper medications . Protestors held posters that said “No drugs should ever cost a life,” and the public also demanded apologies from the pharmacists and factories for egregious prices.

Soon after the sudden rise in medication prices in 2019, people started to hold protests, one of the most famous ones was on October 26, 2021. Most of them held protests in addition to Nice and the NHS to cough up the money for expensive treatments. However, some think we should take a different approach. Robertson thinks that we should solve this problem by seeking the root of the problem and fixing it. Robertson says, “As a patient I want – and need – the NHS to fund palbociclib, but as a citizen, I know there isn’t some magic money tree. We live in a society with limited resources, which means not everyone can get everything they need. Patients rightly demand access, but rather than putting more pressure on where resources are allocated, we should be looking at root causes, like why the drugs are so expensive in the first place.”