New NBC Game Show “Rx Factor” Features Senior Citizens Performing Wild Stunts for Prescription Medication

As millions of sick elderly Americans are reduced to poverty by escalating prescription medication costs and the subversion of Medicare, NBC has introduced a bold new game show which features destitute senior citizens performing wild and sometimes gruesome stunts for the drugs they need to survive.  The show, “Rx Factor”, premiered last night amidst a maelstrom of controversy that served to enhance it’s hype and ratings.

The first episode began with the show’s host, Carson Daily, introducing a doddering seventy-four year old woman whose walker aided entrance onstage had to be edited for time.  The woman, identified as Florence, revealed that she suffered from stomach cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, and that as a result of having to pay over $500 a month for the same medication that she used to pay just $200 for a year ago, she’d been forced to move out of her home of forty-two years and into a studio apartment in a bad part of town just to make ends meet.  The sad story elicited a murmur of sympathy from the studio audience and a condescending gesture of contrived compassion from Daly.  Florence was then fitted for scuba gear, put into a cage, and descended into a tank full of sharks in exchange for a free Mutamycin shot and a bottle of Celebrex.

Later in the show, a seventy year old man was catapulted one hundred yards into a net for a year’s supply of Cardizem to treat his high blood pressure, an eighty year old man with severe cataracts was sent wandering around a bus station for an hour dressed as a woman in exchange for lens replacement surgery, a seventy-three year old man skydived for a month’s worth of kidney dialysis, and a sixty-eight year old diabetic woman spent five minutes in a closed room with a flatulent elephant for insulin and an immunosuppressive agent needed to prevent the rejection of her transplanted kidney.

Despite Rx Factor’s immense initial success, the show elicited an avalanche of protest from individuals who feel that the stunts the elderly contestants are made to perform for their medication are degrading and in some cases dangerous.

“I feel that the stunts the elderly contestants are forced to perform for their medication are degrading and in some cases dangerous,” remarked one young woman who went on to indicate that she has a grandmother whom she’d never want to see strapped to the undercarriage of a helicopter by her wheelchair and lifted ten stories into the air for a couple bottles of beta blockers.

Jeff Zucker, president of NBC’s entertainment division, addressed the controversy surrounding the show: “I feel that Rx Factor can and will prove to be a valuable endowment to the social and cultural fabric of America.  It targets a troubling problem facing our nation, and especially our senior citizens, and it strives to improve that problem in a fashion that entertains millions and generates large sum financial transactions that aid our economy.”

Rx Factor can be seen Wednesdays at 9pm after “Where’s Dad?