You would think this would be the case with as much money as Google is paying to settle charges against the company for “trafficking illegal drugs.” The cool $500 million should put a dent in our debt at least, anyway.

But the charges are pretty darn stupid, and the reasoning behind the activity itself resonate with every American who has had to tighten their belts, cut back, and sacrifice food for gas or electricity since the financial collapse of the country in 2007. Google is only promoting Canadian drugs via their website—ads that automatically show when a user is searching for such products. You might think that Google is running an underground heroine ring when in reality, they’re only making more choices available to the American public—something that the country itself has failed to provide.

Instead, we continue to see medical costs rise, and a growing number of uninsured or underinsured people are unable to afford their medication. Just recently I heard a friend tell about how he’ll be paid an extra amount of money every month for declining the company’s good insurance option and going for the cheaper option (that covers virtually nothing) instead! How is this even legal?

And of course he went for the money; most of us would in times like these. My husband and I are about $10,000 behind in our bills (not counting sheer debt; just what’s due now) due to us both being laid off in the past couple of years. He continues to search for a job even as I type this. It goes without saying that neither of us, nor our daughter, have medical insurance. Even if we did, of course, we’d still be tempted to seek medication elsewhere; when our daughter was a baby and we had to pay for her monthly shot against the RSV virus, our co-pay alone was $500 a month. A month! Luckily I had a salary job that allowed us to afford the medication, but if that happened today I don’t know what we’d do. Sell a kidney, maybe? I kid, but what else can you do when things get this tight?

Prosecuting Google isn’t going to stop anything, either. On the contrary, it will just make desperate people more desperate—something that hurts us all. Desperate people lie, steal, kill, and do whatever it takes to save their loved ones or themselves. Come on, Department of Justice, haven’t you seen John Q? And it’s not like Google was even providing the drugs in the first place; no one made people click on those ads. I’m usually not an advocate for big companies (particularly those whose algorithm changes screw up my job), but in this case it’s just silly.

If you don’t want people crossing the border for drugs, fine; just make medicines cheap. Give us free health care (you know, the kind that you and everyone else in the government has right now) and make all meds cost around $5 (there are plenty of generics that cost even less than this, depending upon where you go to purchase them). Until you do, this is going to continue, and possibly get even worse.