Dr. Michael Saracino, Pharm.D

I am now retired, but worked my entire adult life in health care as a pharmacist; mostly in hospitals, plus four years consulting in nursing homes. I have rounded with physicians in Intensive Care Units, and Coronary Care Units. I reviewed antibiotic therapy, and patients receiving total parenteral nutrition. I could not support this bill with greater ernest and clarity. I have no place to put the understanding that a State or a country would not do everything in its power to insure the people living therein did not have access to good, affordable, effective healthcare, before and after being admitted to a hospital. We are a strange country indeed. In the 1883, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck—representing the German Empire introduced the world's first national social health insurance system in 1883. We are only 142 years behind. Make no mistake, and it is not hyperbole to say so, the cuts to Medicaid, affordable access to vaccines (in the State of NH), and any access to healthcare will and does result in more deaths and greater disability. And please, do not ask me to get started on the bizarre things coming out of the current federal administration's HHS and FDA. Acetaminophen during pregnancy causes autism? Bat-poop crazy. The defunding of mRNA vaccine research --the COVID vaccine is an mRNA vaccine. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives, possibly more, and could have saved even more lives had politics not interfered with medical science. People, including many children, are already getting sick, and some dying, due to the anti-vaccine rhetoric. Measles is resurging. Just wait until polio resurges and takes your grandchild's ability to walk. Even as a child in grammar school I could not wait to get the, what was then, new polio vaccine. I had a neighor who walked in braces. I did not want to share his fate. If only adults could think as clearly. And what happens when smallpox resurges, or Ebola gets out of Africa? Please THINK!!!