Sorry, but how does the fact that the government pays for your mother's healthcare make your position more defensible?

> I can walk 5 minutes down the block and buy an eight ball of fentanyl from a guy named TJ but I can't get Alzheimer's treatment made by a team of scientists in a cutting-edge lab because it doesn't meet some government worker's idea of "good enough"?

You're implying that "some government worker" is too incompetent to have the power to regulate experimental drugs. And now you're arguing that it'd be cool for those same government workers to rubber stamp approve and also pay for drugs that don't have the backing of scientific evidence, which is the textbook archetype of "incompetent government worker".

Not that your hypothetical question makes any sense. "TJ" selling fentanyl down the block is illegal. Biogen selling this unapproved drug is illegal. You have the same ability and legal issues to try to buy from them.

This is going to sound harsh, but the fact that other people (government/tax payers) are paying for it makes this even less defensible - wasting your own money on treatments that is likely to not work is one thing, but this risks diverting a shared resource from treatments that _do_ work.

I recently lost my grandfather to vascular dementia, so I understand the feeling of hopelessness, but this is not a solution. I'd _perhaps_ support your right to buy the drug privately, but this would open others up to scams and treatments that have no chance of working (or are in fact harmful). This isn't the same as the war on drugs, where people wanting to buy a particular drug are stopped for (largely) moralistic reasons - this is about ensuring the drug does what the company claims and protecting desperate people from being ripped off.

I hope you can find peace. I’ve been in your situation and I understand the desperate hope for anything at all that has even a chance of working.

Be well.

Thank you <3

Are Medicare or Medicaid covering Aduhelm to treat Alzheimer's? I don't know how the flow goes from FDA approval to certification for use by the government-administered insurance programs.

That would be Biogen's next step, politically speaking: use public pressure ("They're preventing us from getting a drug that might help!") to force Medicare to cover it.