I go to Mercury Drug each week, and each time I see these faces, queuing in front of the counter with a look that is both hesitant and indignant but ultimately resigned and begging for some small comfort they know will never come from the pharmacist staring them down.

They stand there, holding a piece of paper in one hand and a worn-down purse (they may as well use a plastic bag) in the other, sad, helpless, like they’re clawing through straws, furious, trying to climb up, though they probably know they’re grabbing at nothing but air. They seem to me like they’re drowning in air.

They’re the poor who, already deep in debt trying to make ends meet with a budget of less than a hundred a day for an oversized, very extended family of 12, has had, by some cruel trick of fate, to deal with a father or a husband or a grandparent who has tuberculosis or has suffered a stroke.

So, they line up in a drugstore with money borrowed from a loan shark or charged against their future salaries, so they can buy that antibiotic or pill that costs as much as a week’s worth of the food they are already in short supply of.

Call me emotional, but I think the biggest lie Big Pharma is making us swallow is that we don’t deserve to live if we can’t pay up because good health – with all the research and marketing that go into it – costs money.

I took my son once for an asthma attack to the emergency room of Makati Med – I think the guys at the hospital call that area the “pit” (or maybe I’m just watching too much of Grey’s Anatomy). As I waited while my son was being treated, I eavesdropped on a conversation between three residents and a frail, small woman sitting on a chair, held up by a pair of oversized slippers.

She was staring blankly into a wall. Her husband was on life support in a nearby cubicle – his lungs eaten up by cancer after years of smoking – and the residents were trying to explain to her that while they could keep her husband breathing, there would be no point in doing that because there was no chance he’d be waking up again anyway.

But she just kept repeating: “Can’t you do anything more? He’s my husband. He’s the only one earning for us.”

Finally, a snooty woman – maybe the head nurse – cut in and told her bluntly and rather crassly, “You won’t be able to afford it if we keep him breathing here.”

There was a time when there were great physicians and chemists who worked there asses off without hardly any compensation, so they could find a cure to a plague or an illness that was decimating mankind. Now, it seems all they do is find a wonder drug so they could earn billions and keep their shareholders happy.