The responsibility for people's health goes to that person - not businesses who supply medication for the illness.
I wouldn't be surprised if their mission statements or values statements say something different..
Fact is if they are in the business of supplying medication, so they are expected to be responsible for their customers health involving those medications and supplying them. Likewise a doctor who is care of your health and guiding your medical decisions, takes some responsibility over your health and it's progress..
I don't see this in absolutes on either side.. We have to take some responsibility for our health, but we naturally expect the institutions we trust with our health to be responsible too.
But this issue isn't really about responsibility over health.. it's about money and being short a 1.50.. And up to a certain point you were mostly focusing on capitalistic arguments and then switched to this responsibility argument.
You also even said at one point, that you would be willing to pay the extra 1.50 yourself for her..
So what I'm saying is that the woman and her boyfriend should be better prepared. She should either carry her medication all the time since it's factual that she can have an attack at any time or make sure she always carries enough money to buy medication should she ever need it. She needs to be better prepared. And CVS isn't in the wrong because she isn't prepared.
You can't just walk into a pharmacy and buy an inhaler over the counter.. You need a prescription, and she had one.. so there was some planning and preparedness on her part.
But I am not going to argue that people shouldn't be prepared, they should.. The thing is, if she didn't even have a prescription and just went to ER, we would have never heard about this story. The only reason this story is in the news is because of a 1.50.
All of this is over such a small sum of money, and this couple offered collateral and didn't even expect to get the inhaler for free, or for less than it really was. They just wanted her to able to take the medicine to stop the attack so it didn't get worse or life threatening. I don't really see how that violates any supposed capitalistic structure as you claim it does.. They were paying customers, and they didn't expect anything for free or less than it's market value.