Your friend has a deadly disease that requires regular doctor visits and prescriptions.
I think that this is a sketchy way to phrase this. Presumably, what a disease requires is a cure (or one of several cures). ‘Doctor visits’ and ‘prescriptions’ are one system society can have to assign cures to people, but there could also be other systems, like ‘you get to walk to a store and buy insulin if you want some without needing anybody’s seal of approval, and you can also see somebody to advise you on how much insulin to take’. Saying that the disease requires regular doctor visits and prescriptions seems to me to rhetorically imply that the costs associated with those are due to the disease, not due to the health care system, without doing the work of checking how well the system works (after all, if the system were about as well as we could manage, the costs really would be due to the disease).
I think that this is a sketchy way to phrase this. Presumably, what a disease requires is a cure (or one of several cures). ‘Doctor visits’ and ‘prescriptions’ are one system society can have to assign cures to people, but there could also be other systems, like ‘you get to walk to a store and buy insulin if you want some without needing anybody’s seal of approval, and you can also see somebody to advise you on how much insulin to take’. Saying that the disease requires regular doctor visits and prescriptions seems to me to rhetorically imply that the costs associated with those are due to the disease, not due to the health care system, without doing the work of checking how well the system works (after all, if the system were about as well as we could manage, the costs really would be due to the disease).