by nyceve
Tue Nov 29, 2005 at 11:12:27 AM PDT
I read Booman’s incredible diary this morning The Girl With Faraway Eyes and just became so sad. What a crime. My question is do any political leaders who read these shocking diaries become as outraged as I do?
If my own experience with certain local NYS leaders (who I have deliberately decided not to name) is any indication the answer is no. The insurance problem is so immense that the political spill over is going to hit every politician–Republican and Democrat alike. If you are in a position to respond to this national crisis and you don’t–you’re going down.
Politicians: If you take good care of yourselves and ignore The Girl With Faraway Eyes–you’re going down.
Quite a few have asked me what’s happening with my own health insurance crisis. Here’s what’s happening.
I am jumping through hoops, so that I will qualify for a small group plan. Doing all this is not easy, it is complex, expensive and to what end? Essentially turning my life upside down–all to get insurance. I am able to do this. Many Americans cannot. This is not right.
But the problem extends well beyond the self-employed. Across the country, small businesses are being forced to give-up insurance because of the unaffordable, skyrocketing premiums. The Girl With Faraway Eyes is your sister, your mother, your aunt, your best friend. She is middle class, she is working class, she works hard and plays by the rules. The Girl With Faraway Eyes is an American citizen, God damnit!
When I had insurance–a PPO which allowed me to see doctors out of the network for a significant aditional charge (which then I must pray the insurance company will reimburse), I used to refer to those non-PPO doctors as my champagne doctors. These were the doctors I splurged on. Yes, it was a splurge! They were my luxury purchase.
This is no longer so amusing–and it shouldn’t have been then, but sometimes I have a mordant sense of humor. Seeing a doctor should not be on par with drinking some expensive wine–but sadly, in America, this is our nightmare reality. Many Americans are shoehorned into very inadequate health plans which allow little or no choice. Many Americans have health problems which require that they see “champagne doctors”. But they are not permitted to do so and as a result they don’t receive what we are told is the finest healthcare in the world.
Don’t ever forget The Girl With Faraway Eyes, she is the face of America. And what a shameful America it is.
Champagne doctors and caviar dreams…..sorry, first thing that popped into me head. The state of health care in the country is OBSCENE.
Best of luck to you, and thank you for your ability to empathize and take your own experiences to a larger realm. So glad to see you posting here, BTW!
Thanks for your kind words. Booman’s diary really resonated with me. You’re so right, I’ll go even further, what we having going in America is pornographic.
If you are in a position to respond to this national crisis and you don’t–you’re going down.
Yes, they are. It’s amazing how unresponsive the current political leadership is to this crisis; I wouldn’t be surprised if many were just downright uninformed. I remember arguing with a blog commenter about American attitudes concerning universal health care coverage; the progressive liberal commenter insisted that the majority of the country doesn’t favor it and thus the Democratic party was correct in not aligning itself with this “socialist” idea. Total BS. The majority of the country not only favors universal coverage, but a high minority (like 45% plus) is willing to pay some sort of higher tax or premium to guarantee it. Analysis has already shown that a universal coverage plan can conceivably streamline costs and provide preventative care, thus decreasing our coverage expenses.
Politicians had better get on the ball about this, and now!
Not all porn is obscene.
I’ll go you both one better: what we have in america is a snuff flick.
Btw, I too do not have insurance. I have now been diagnosed with a malady called Horner’s syndrome, have spent $430 so far in ophthomologist fees, will soon have a head and neck MRI to the tune of $1,300 (that’s the cheapest my doc could find, other quotes were in excess of $2,000), and will then see a neuro-ophthamologist at UCSF. Only then will they get started figuring what actually to do about it (i.e. fix it). What fun 🙂
If the result is interesting I’ll blog about it and, perhaps, include MRI images. The story of why I need a neck MRI to diagnose an eye problem deserves a diary all its own. Definitely not very intelligent design.
This is the fundamental problem with a private sector health care system. The private sector has no higher priority than optimizing their profits. This means, when a difficult time looms on the horizon (such as the boomer retirement), getting as much money as you can and getting out before it arrives.
Great diary and Boo’s too.
I am one of those that does not qualify for insurance due to past health problems (and haven’t since I was 35 and ex forgot to send in the payment prior to me having first problems) and the only thing available is very high cost…..I am staying out of Medicare so far, just don’t want to be in that system or any system, I ‘ll take my chances, thank you very much United States.
It’s absurd really, I have always thought, to not have health care avaible to all people, everywhere, least of all, here in the richest company in the world. So much better to have stacks of billionaires and millionaires, most of which was made off the backs of folks like me and you.
Diane-If you’re eligible for Medicare, why don’t you enroll. It’s basically the only real entitlement left in this country.
What we need is Medicare or some version of it expanded to include all Americans.
Agreed, Boo did a wonderful diary and it inspired my own.
Diane,
I would very strongly advise you to sign up for Medicare ASAP! There are a hell of a lot of changes going on re: the Medicare system due to the new rx plan. link
In addition, to the rx’s there are changes in over types of coverage(s) available as well. The bad part if that this is a nightmare trying to figure all of this out, however, if you do sign up now, you will have until a certain amount of time (mid January, if I am not mistaken) and you will be able to change the policy that you have w/o penalty.
I have been finding out what I could and no matter who I talk to, I am told something different. (Have been stocking up on my rx’s so, in case I have to switch, which I probably will.)
Am really beginning to wonder if there is a possibility that litigation may result from this.
Best of luck.
I’m am just jaw-droppingly disgusted that we do not have universal health care in this country.
I was raised with no health insurance. I do not have a single memory of going to a doctor. I got stitches twice in ER’s around the city, and then my dad cut them out several days later. I had chronic ear infections that went untreated. Rich kids called them ear infections, but to our family they were just earaches. I remember lying on the couch with a hot water bottle on the sore ear, and just crying in pain.
Fast forward about 15 years and now I am a young mother raising 4 kids without insurance. I took them to low cost or free clinics for immunizations, but they missed out on a lot of well-child care. When there was a bad cut or feared broked bone, we used the ER of various hospitals and we spread the visits around to avoid the humiliation of being told at check-in that we still owed X number of dollars from last time.
Fast forward again and now my kids are older and my new husband has a very good job with a very very large company that used to have excellent insurance. His monthly premium for the 5 of us has increased from around $300 per month to almost $900 a month in the past 3 years. We can afford it, but it’s happening everywhere with employees at smaller companies being hit the hardest. It’s unconscionable.
When I was a “contractor,” i.e. a regular employee that’s denied benefits, I paid over $300 a month to have health insurance. After doing that for about 3 years, my company finally “hired me,” i.e. nothing at all changed except that now I get benefits. So after finally getting health insurance paid for, the company decides to switch to this piece of shit insurance plan where co-pays are like $30-40 for regular doctor visits, and coverage is limited.
What kind of “great” country is this when people are afraid of going bankrupt, or doing without treatment, when they are sick?
That’s the problem, it’s NOT a great country any more. Youhit the nail on the head.
Any time health insurance/medical care comes up my first thoughts are so explative filled I can’t do any posting at first.
This comes from my own experience with the health care system and how it basically ruined my life in a way…I couldn’t work due to health problems but doctors said I had no health problems and without work I had no insurance etc etc etc..when finally after some 30 years of trying to work, continually collapsing and still being told my problems were in my head it was found I had massive nerve damage and had a hereditary neuro-muscular disease. However that didn’t stop the problems as most doctors know nothing of this disease and don’t want to read up on it or even test other family members..who are all going through similar problems with this disease and can’t work or get help….a vicious circle. The system of health care here is completely broken and puts many many people into the ranks of either homeless or living on the fringe because they can not get help to become productive members of society-if they just had some decent and basic health care.
The system is simply obscene especially in the fact that if you do have pre-existing medical problems or have had breast cancer, strokes etc you then can’t get insurance…unless your a billionaire and can afford the outrageous premiums.
There are certainly many things wrong in this country but not having universal health care for all is pigheaded and immoral beyond belief to say nothing of it being stupid in terms of economic issues. Meaning we can’t compete globally due to the fact that other countries can pay less in wages due to the fact that they have universal health care..the list is enormous for the benefits of universal health care and why assholes in D.C. can’t see that is beyond me.
There I managed to get through this post with no cussing or anything….quite amazing really.
I think diaries like this one needs to be an ongoing series so we can make sure that this issue is kept in the forefront and start making our senators and representatives aware that we want this issure addressed for the good of everyone..or else ask them to give everyone the same coverage they recieve courtesy of the taxpayers.
chocolate ink, this is exactly what I’m trying to do.
Just a tiny bit of history. My insurance was cancelled I did a diary about this on Kos which received loads of attention, then I did several follow ups also got tons of comments.
So I have started to follow the health care crisis very closely and write about it as much as possible.
When the disaster strikes you, you really become involved.
I wonder if you’ve checked out a ‘major medical’ as opposed to a comprehensive policy? I am looking for something along those lines.
Catastrophic coverage is better than nothing. Atleast it should keep you out of bankruptcy.
will keep anyone with a hospital bill of $100,000 out of bankruptcy as long as they have $20,000.
of getting this sort of coverage on the consumer end of things, I kind of shudder that it’s even being offered on the policy end. This is encouraging a system in which people skip preventative care and end up costing the system astronomically, both morally and financially, by having people end up in the ER with preventable castrastropic illnesses. It’s just totally immoral that we’d let managable conditions, like diabetes and hypertension, escalate into stroke or heart attack. How do the anti-universal coverage people not understand that not only is this morally indefensible, but costs us exponentially more than making sure everyone has primary care? </end rant>
From the point of view of the corporations, it is simply a question of money. If a worker becomes unusable, he or she is easily replaced, and at a much lower cost than it would require to purchase preventive and early stage medical treatment for that worker. Remember that most of those catastrophic policies offered to the low wage earner not only have a deductible higher than the worker is likely to be able to pay, not to mention the 20% of the huge bill that will be their responsibility, but also have “caps,” for instance, if the policy will pay only up to $200,000, and the medical treatment required for continuation of life will cost $500,000, and the life insurance, if any, for the worker is 10 or 20 thousand, this coverage is useless several times over. The hospital is most likely in such a case to fulfill their legal obligation to stabilize the worker, and he or she will return to the home to complete the expiration process, since they lack sufficient income to purchase more substantial treatment, and since they are not likely in such an advanced stage of illness to be of further use to the employer, once they are terminated for a non-related reason, or abandon the job due to inability to be present and work it, even that catastrophic coverage is gone.
Of course, those with any resources at all will gladly sacrifice them in order to buy their way, or a loved one’s out of pain, or prolong life, which is one of the reasons medical treatment is such a high profit industry – the market will bear virtually anything the consumer has or is likely to have. He will borrow, steal, sign away the family home, resigned to take his family and live on the streets, there is no limit, no price that someone will say is too high to save the life and health of a loved one, even their own life.
This, coupled with a limitless supply of expendable labor is why the US market-driven system is ideal for the medical treatment and insurance industries.
Culturally, the system is popular, strange as it may seem, even with those whom it impacts most negatively. It is not at all unusual to hear low wage earners complain about not being able to afford medical treatment, and almost in the same breath, condemn the notion of “socialized medicine.” This value was intensively and successfully inculcated during the US “cold war, ” but it also dovetails nicely with the traditional American value of poverty as a character defect, or for the more religious, a punishment from God or merely “his will.” Some American clerics base their teachings on the premise that the cause of individual poverty is failure to send sufficient amounts of money to the cleric, making the argument that even if God’s will does not include prosperity in the earthly life, giving the cleric money will improve the individual’s chances of receiving a benefit in the afterlife. Devotees of politicians frequently make a similar argument, that if those who suffer will only send money to their favorite, while it may not result in their being able to obtain medical treatment, will provide a psychological benefit as the patient hears the politician agree that everyone should be able to have medical treatment, and maybe one day it will be possible for that $100,000 hospital bill to be reduced to $80,000, or that families with $5000 to give to insurance companies may one day have to give them only $4000.
Almost all agree that Americans are proud of their freedom to purchase all the medical treatment they can afford, and see this as a mark of their nation’s greatness.
Unusable is certainly an operative word here Duct. I know that I tried to hang on to my job such as it was because I was covered by healthcare..yet I kept as I said collapsing at work without doctors getting the right diagnosis…I was on/off partial disability trying to recover from an unknown disease and finally when I was even trying to keep my job by taking work home I went in one day to drop off some medical bills only to be told that they had dropped me several months ago and basically had fired me without telling me. Not that I should have been working in the first place as my trying to keep working-to keep health care coverage-had greatly advanced my medical problems to an irreversible degree–yup if you’re not healthy or can’t be helped medically in one or two visits employers pretty much dump you. And what came after that only got uglier(going bankrupt and losing everything yet being to broke to file for bankruptcy….using one credit card to pay the rent and other bills till even that was a no go and all used up.)
what makes our nation great is all the pets who now have health insurance
Eve great diary and informative. I caught some of your dairy earlier over at kos. Although I have insurance my brother and sister-in-law don’t. I’ve seen them suffer with an ailment and try every home remedy that they can think of. Luckily the ailments they’ve had, haven’t been life threatening. It’s sad to see in the US; it has come to this. The health care debacle is only one of the many problems we have, but when the problem affects you or a loved one directly, it hits home.
It seems we are running backward as fast as we can to catch up with third world countries.
O sometimes the problem has to become so enormous that the citizenry sues for change.
I fear we are approaching a breaking point, either we go over the cliff or the political leadership will be forced to address this with some bold ideas which may entail collective sacrifice.
Eve sadly to say, I don’t see the breaking point coming for a long time. Collective sacrifices. Besides the medical establishment and insurance cartels it would be a sacrifice of everyday people who are already covered. None of them will be willing to give up anything. I see no answer to this. It’s not hopeless and I know it, I just don’t know what it is going to take to get the ball rolling.
antibiotics at the aquarium store, btw, and skip the cost of a visit to the doctor. Pretty sad commentary on the state of the union that I even mentioned (or knew about) that, eh? Kind of like poor people dining on dog food, we can treat ourselves with fish medicine.
to get cough medicine. Pretty soon we’ll be having “medication bootleggers.” Have a still in the backyard whipping up Prozac…
i dont know who is going down…which politician….who is even talking about helathcare?
americans are asleep…maybe not enough are uninsured….maybe not enough are sick….the people are not organized or even pissed off enough to do anything….americans keep voting for lunatics…i dont understand what its going to take to wake america up….but right now they sleep in ignorance and watch desperate housewives and stand in line for hours to shop at walmart for more crap.
I think that there are almost 40 million who are uninsured but because they are the very poor or ones who aren’t on even medicaid…it’s ignored as it always is when you’re talking about poor people, including the very poor working poor. Although now the health care problem is starting to really hit home to the middle and even upper middle class which is why it is starting to get talked about.
The poor can’t afford to hire lobbyists to get the message out that not having health care coverage as a universal act of decency and moral imperative means until someone starts some major lobbying or get the public to really rally behind the idea of universal health care we will continue to be screwed.
Medicaid is practically history! Eligibility has been tightened to the point where it is virtually impossible to be eligible. Also, many necessary procedures have been labelled as “cosmetic” and are not covered–example dental work. Sounds like nothing much, but the fact is that an infected tooth can lead to serious health problems.
I know and I also know that there are so many people out there who think poor people can just go apply for medicaid and get it…and they also don’t realize how much is not covered..same way with eye glasses. Right now they are still covered but if you break your glasses or your eyes change in less than 2 years your shit out of luck…then of course you have to find an eye doctor that will even take Medicaid patients anyway. Something else all those people who say those poor people should just get a job…well if you have bad teeth no one will hire you, if you can’t see you can’t get a job and numerous other things like this that people just don’t think about when saying that poor people ought to just get a job. Then of course you get into the whole fact that most poor people have no real skills and if they do find a job it’s one that has no health care coverage which does them no good as to dental, glasses etc.
Also don’t realize how the eligibility criteria has been tightened.
Actually this was after a couple of weeks of not having work. I knew nothing about the system, when I finally realized no work was forthcoming I looked into unemployment and found out since I didn’t apply the day I stopped working I couldn’t get any kind of compensation for those weeks already gone by. So I applied and the day after I got approved to start getting unemployment I got sick. When you are not actively looking for work you can’t get unemployment.
So I was sick and got sicker. I could hardly breathe. I could hardly walk. There was a doctor’s office in the downstairs of my building. I staggered down there and asked if I could see the doctor. They asked me did I have insurance? I said no. They said that I could not be seen unless I paid $90 in cash up front. At that point I had about $70 in my bank account after two weeks of not having work.
It took me 3 days after that to find a doctor who would see me. It cost me $300. I charged it. The antibiotics and other meds cost another few hundred. I charged that too.
The debts I racked up for that and for other things, just trying to support myself during those months and not be out on the street, I am still paying all that off.
All that happened to me when I was living a 15 minute bike ride from the White House. A 30 minute bus trip from Capitol Hill. None of those rich men care about what happens to ordinary Americans just trying to get by. I am angry.
I’m very sorry to hear about your go around with the whole system ….it all seems designed to make sure people without enough money get doubly and triply screwed over instead of really trying to help people. The thing that galls me even more is that rich people seem to get things given to them simply cause their rich which is a truly insane also.
Being poor means you have to jump through hoops and be humiliated and treated many times as if it’s your fault your poor and/or that you’re somehow trying to get something for nothing because you’re lazy..Unemployment, healthcare, welfare all seem designed to keep poor or low income people poor..and humilated.
Oh yes. I believed for a long time that it was my fault I was poor. Sometimes even now I have to shake myself a bit. And dealing with the unemployment agency was just misery itself. I refused even to look into food stamps even though I may well have been eligible. I had some dignity left. Not much.
One of the greatest evils in our country is this lie that we tell ourselves and the poor, that poverty is a moral failing, the fault of the poor person. Especially when said poor person is working full time at thankless jobs that help to perpetuate the power and wealth of those above them in the hierarchy.
Example: the work of Washington, DC would grind to a screeching halt without the bicycle couriers who carry papers and packages from one place to another. Yet they are paid far below minimum wage, exploited, and treated like dirt by the people who send and receive the packages.
To bring it right back around to the issue of health care and insurance, here is the story of a bicycle courier who was hit by a car. Because no witnesses to the accident have come forward, his insurance company is refusing to pay – because he is completely incapacitated and cannot tell anyone what happened, much less “prove” his claim.
Can’t tell you how many times I have had to appeal a decision by a social service agency (and know that I was right re: grounds for the appeal) only to hear that there was a “policy change” and that “we can’t do anything until a certain form is filled out.” OK, then give me the damn form or fill it out. “It’s policy not to do that until this agency a) assesses, b)evaluates, or whatever.” Meanwhile, those who supposedly “work” do absolutely nothing but claim there in meetings all day, when they are actually surfing the net, whining about the size of their caseloads, or taking extended vacations on holiday weekends. I wish I had $1.00 for every time I heard that so-and-so was off work after a holiday weekend due to “a death in the family”.
Sure!
Sad thing about it is that you are not the only one. Only thing that a person can do w/o health insurance is to go to the emergency room. Then all of those (republican voters) who are fortunate enough to have health insurance (and also whine repeatedly about needing tax breaks) might start to realize that something is drastically wrong with the health care system in this country when they see their premiums rise.
One solution a friend and I considered was that I would go to Virginia and lie and say I lived at her house so that I could be treated at an ER there that would treat regardless of ability to pay, and could provide much better quality care than I could get in DC. I didn’t like to do that though and I didn’t want to get saddled with a bill for thousands of dollars to hang over my head for years and years.
Per my doctor: hospitals are used to that kind of stuff and always write it off. Also have some medical bills that I have absolutely no way to pay/can’t afford it. At least in my state, medical bills are not counted against you when renting an apartment! At least I have had no prob.
Yeah, I’ve heard varying things on that. I was really leery because of an experience I had had a few years before, while I was still a student on my parents’ insurance. While I was out of the state on a trip I injured myself and had to go to the ER for x-rays. I didn’t have the insurance information with me so gave them my address for it to be sorted out later.
There were no broken bones but that wasn’t much of a consolation when my parents for whatever reason did not deal with the claim or the hospital in a timely manner. So the hospital’s bill collectors started calling me at school and harassing me over the unpaid bill. Being the naive little thing I was, I told them I had no money and my parents were supposed to handle that, but of course they threatened me, my credit rating, and my dog if I had one that I better pay them however many hundreds of dollars it was, NOW.
So after that, I was not about to trust that any hospital anywhere was just going to forgive a debt.
i understand 40 million are uninsured….
i also understand half of americans who could didnt bother to get up off their asses and vote for a president to lead this country.
nothing short of a bloody revolution with riots and strikes is going to change anything in this country i fear and as long as the people are sleeping thats not going to happen.