Pharmacist says he has filled Alzheimer's prescriptions for members of Congress (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Pharmacist says he has filled Alzheimer's prescriptions for members of Congress (2017)

vox.com

76 pointshammock34 comments

The average age of the 118th Congress is 58 years old. The average age of the Senate is 64 years.

Source: https://fiscalnote.com/blog/how-old-118th-congress

For most people with Alzheimer's — those who have the late-onset variety — symptoms first appear in their mid-60s or later.

Source: https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-are-signs-alzheimers-dis....

So, yeah. Of course there are individuals in Congress on Alzheimers drugs.

Edit: Oh, and Mitch has frozen up for a second time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66663389.

There really should be a baseline health test that people in public office must pass.

One quarter of Congress is over age 70, the highest portion ever. Chart: https://twitter.com/thisisinsider/status/1569785511388262400

The idea of a health test keeps getting tossed out a lot as a solution, but it has the issue of all qualification tests for office -- the loss of perceived legitimacy of representatives if it was seen as a biased tool that's open to manipulation at worst, or functionally useless by being too narrow at best. I can't think of another trait besides maximum age to use that would be seen as fair, and good luck getting any constitutional amendment done in our political climate right now.

> There really should be a baseline health test that people in public office must pass.

It's called an election.

The problem is that people either don't bother to show up and vote, or vote for candidates purely by party affiliation or campaign marketing dollars.

>The problem is that people either don't bother to show up and vote, or vote for candidates purely by party affiliation or campaign marketing dollars.

The first part leads directly to the second. Primary elections are low-turnout affairs, but the extremes of each party are far likelier to participate in them than moderates. We get bad choices in general elections because we abdicate nomination power to nutsos by not voting in primaries.

> The problem is that...

People only get one choice, so view it as a binary choice on party lines.

Give people a transferrable vote and you'll see parties putting more than one candidate forward with different focuses. Voter's might actually stand a chance of getting what they want rather than voting against something they don't like.

Published Oct. 2017.

Also, a rather important update tacked to the bottom:

> After this story went viral, the pharmacist interviewed provided an additional statement clarifying his remarks. “I am not aware of any member that actually has Alzheimer’s and would certainly not disclose any such information if I did know.” He added, “patient privacy is a very serious matter that I am committed to upholding.”

> He said that he was “[s]peaking very broadly about disease states that the general American population have and that it also applies to everyone including members of the U.S. House and Senate since they are also people just like you and I.”

Honestly, it sounds like he's trying to (rather weakly) backpedal from releasing private information about some of the most powerful people in the U.S.

It's an interesting question whether this is ethical. On the one hand, representative democracy requires competent representatives, and knowing they have cognitive impairment is really important information for the whole country. On the other hand, I absolutely don't trust a random pharmacist to decide which personal, extremely sensitive information is important enough that they should be able to non-consensually share it.

Powerful people should not enjoy the same privacy guarantees that regular citizens do. They are there to represent us, and we deserve to know if they are incapable of doing that, whether because of health reasons or because they are in the pocket of lobbyists.

Agreed that a random pharmacist, with unknown motivations, should be disclosing any of this. The doctor who prescribed the meds should be (a) encouraging the representative to resign; (b) disclosing it to a proper authority; (c) disclosing to the news media if nothing is done.

It was pretty customary up untli the last few cycles of 80 year-olds being the major party nominees for presidential candidates to release all of their medical records. There is no law forcing this, but ethically, if you believe yourself to be qualified to set policy for and lead the most powerful hegemon to ever exist in the nuclear age, I think you owe it to the world to let them evaluate you on all fronts using all possible information. You no longer deserve privacy. Your tax returns, medical records, all non-classified communications, should be an open book.

There have to be tradeoffs. If you still want privacy, have it, but then you get to stay just a normally wealthy, powerful person and can live out your days sipping mai tais on tropical beaches and doing hookers and blow every night, but not being put in charge of a military with the power to glass half the planet if it wanted to.

I'm pretty sure it's a HIPAA violation for a pharmacist to disclose the medicines prescribed to a patient/customer and they were thisclose to doing so. It's a good law, and a good pharmacist wouldn't even come that close. Otherwise, were do they draw the line? What if it's not a politician, but a teacher or a community leader or a minister, or just someone in the community that the pharmacist wants to gossip about with neighbors and friends? What if it's not Alzheimer's meds but meds for an STI, or part of alcoholism/drug addiction recovery, or the early stages of Parkinsons or ALS, or hormones for a trans person, or meds to address incontinence or a miscarriage?

And if pharmacists choose to share what they know, wouldn't that drive people to get their prescriptions filled another way (fake IDs, assumed identities, black market, cross-border/mail-order) or just not get medicine for fear of a medical secret being announced?

A better alternative: We should stop electing people who are clearly having a hard time thinking.

That seems like very careful wording around the fact that pharmacists don't diagnose illnesses. My prescriptions never have a "for x disease" written on them.

Technically true, but sometimes you need a diagnosis code to fill the prescription. Also pharmacists will often talk to the physician. Since this was 2017, the medicines in question were probably donepezil and memantine. With that combination, you can be sure the issues are cognitive in nature.

Cynical Reaction: So what? I've heard plenty of stories, over decades, about how every congressman (who isn't permanently retiring from politics) is far too busy fundraising and talking to lobbyists and trying to get media coverage and {other not-in-our-interest political crap} to pay attention to what they are voting on. If we are lucky, the bill was mostly written by junior congressional staff, who still retain a few small fragments of "for the voters" idealism. If we're unlucky, the bill was written by whichever lobbyist wrote the fattest check. Either way, it hardly matters to us if Senator Slime-Trail needs an aide to rescue him when he can't find the urinal in the Lady's Room.

When Trump got elected, I remember hearing lots of stories about how it took him forever to fill his cabinet seats.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/politics/trump-cabinet-vacanc...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/11/politics/temps-and-vacancies/...

https://time.com/4703304/why-president-trump-struggling-to-s...

The machine runs itself. I wonder how much ability any elected official has to move the machine in one direction or the other. Probably not much, at least in any meaningful way.

Congress absolutely has a lot of power over things. Congress controls the budget and legislative direction for the country. With the passage of a law, it can shut down entire departments. With the inability to pass say, a budget, entire swaths of the government shut down.

The President also has a fair amount of power, over seat appointments, usage of Executive Orders, and one we haven't seen since President Andrew Jackson, the ability to willfully ignore things that the President is suppose to do (President Jackson famously ignored the outcome of Worcester v. Georgia to the peril of the Cherokee).

That said, thanks to the Pendleton Act (and subsequent reforms)[0] one thing the President can't due is wholly fire and hire rank and file members of the federal government based on political patronage. Thats why even with those empty cabinet positions the government didn't grind to a complete halt. What is unfortunately very common, is goals / mandates set by cabinet heads means alot of departments have lots and lots of frequent changes in what guidelines / department rules are and are suppose to be followed. That said however, core mandates of departments can't be wholly dismantled based on the presidency at any given moment, so even with changes in the heads of the departments by incoming administrations, there is still a relatively limited amount of things they can do that will affect the day to day.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...

Jackson gets a pass for The Bank War.

How about getting some Senators that actually do pay attention to what they are voting on? The first step is making it public that some of them are losing their capabilities (although that should be obvious by watching McConnell or Pelosi).

To what end? They are not working for us. Convincing the mafia boss to send Ivy League-educated enforcers, to shake your neighborhood down for protection money, does not meaningfully improve life in your neighborhood.

We have this thing called voting where we could chose senators that do work for us.

Imagine if everyone turned out to vote .. why doesn’t the US do it on a weekend, or make it some kind of holiday, why is it a Tuesday?

At the time, Tuesday was the best day.

Now it makes no sense other than being an obstacle, and therefore one more thing in the way of people actually running the government.

It's unlikely that either Feinstein or McConnell will be reelected, regardless of when the election is held. The scale of their health effects weren't known at their last election.

Compared to paying enough attention to all of our myriad elected officials, to know which ones of them are up to what kinds of crooked dealings...having to vote on a Tuesday is a "...and remember to staple your 47-part filled-out-by-hand paper tax filing in the upper-left corner before mailing it to the IRS" sort of detail.

So they can step down or get primaried (etc) by people who have full control over their faculties.

Just state you believe improving American politics is hopeless, and stop asking questions as if you expect to be convinced otherwise.

To me, this nihilistic cynicism is self-fulfilling. If the population believes and furthermore accepts, as you do, that politics is inherently irredeemable and corrupt, then that is the politics we will get.

Even if a system is riddled with problems, it is the obligation of a citizen to at least give a damn and expect more from the system.

Additionally, it is ridiculous to ridicule people for trying to fix issue #1 just because there are 10 issues. We can call for fixing, through mere voting or more strictly through law, that legislators are to be mentally fit and retire when they are past a traditional retirement age.

We can also be demanding/expecting our legislators to work for our communities, or lobby/petition to change House elections to Ranked-choice, to lobby for campaign finance reform, or whatever changes you feel are necessary to the structure of our governments.

Congressmen haven't been any of the following in many decades:

* Drafters of legislation

* Debaters of policy

* Thought leaders for the nation at large, or for any subset of it, including rather perversely, Congress

* Experts of any sort on issues that matter at a national level

So basically, there is no reason Alzheimer's medication is incompatible with their job duties.

They farmed it all out to think tanks and said "Give me something I can vote on."

How are the mental faculties of the think tanks and PACs?

Would people change their opinion about someone if they knew or would they just vote along party lines? In some districts it wouldn't matter. The younger generation is not any better, they're entrenched in the same ways of thinking, re foreign policy. The underlying, foundational way of thinking is the same and it's all pretty dismal so having someone old enough to have alzheimers is not any different.

No, but they may vote differently in the primaries. (assuming incumbents have competition)

Maybe part of the reason they vote along party lines is that the party line was specifically designed to be appeal to them though.

The only requirements for serving in congress are meeting an age minimum, some number of years as a U.S. citizen, and residency in the state you represent for some period of time.

The historical makeup and achievements of this body reflect these requirements.

Feinstein apparently had no idea that she was out of the Senate for medical reasons for months. I wouldn't be surprised if she's in the first class cabin of the dementia train.

Maybe she should have been taking her meds.

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