Just watched Keith Olbermann’s hour-long comment on the health care system. His father is going through a serious medical condition and the experience, for both Olbermann and his father, has been horrendous.
Anyone who has had to use their health insurance for serious medical issues has found out, the hard way, the limitations of their coverage. About 62% of Americans in bankruptcy are there because of medical and health issues. Health insurance doesn’t cover the entire medical cost and often enough, the insurance companies deny coverage for certain procedures or therapies. Usually the most expensive procedures and therapies and then a family is faced with, “Do we pay for it ourselves or just let [fill in the blank] die?”
What a choice.
For most, bankruptcy is the choice. Lose everything. Congressman Eric Cantor, at a town hall meeting, told a woman who had no health insurance and was suffering from stomach cancer she should sell all of her belongings to pay for her health care. And when that ran out she would be poor enough to qualify for some government program like Medicaid (she probably wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid) that doesn’t exist and if that didn’t bear any fruit, the woman could beg for charity. That’s the Republican health care plan.
The other part of the Republican “plan” for health care is to punish people who are overweight and smoke. I’m all for getting people to stop smoking and lose weight, but punish them with the health care system?
Then of course the Republicans want to go after lawyers. They want to limit or eliminate all together medical malpractice lawsuits. According to the Republicans this is the biggest reason health care costs are so high even though the facts are, lawsuits make up less than 1% of health care expenditures.
That one has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with trial lawyers overwhelmingly supporting Democrats on Election Day. The truth is, trying to sue the medical profession is difficult. My personal experience, after going to three different law firms after my last encounter with the private health care profession proved that.
None of the law firms would take my case despite them agreeing that the doctors and insurance company had done me wrong.
My story with the health insurance industry has been written about more than a couple times here, but I’ll hit the low points: In January 2005 I had my second hearth attack while at work. A co-worker drove me to the hospital — on his lunch break — to have it checked out.
The emergency room doctor ran a few tests, kept me there for most of the night and told me not to go to work the next day because I had a “cardiac episode.” He actually gave me a form indicating I take that day off.
My employer, a major global telecommunications conglomerate, decided the doctor was referring to the day I had the heart attack, when I had worked all but two hours of my 10-hour work day and that was the impetus for them to terminate me.
He also instructed me to see my primary care physician for follow up treatments. So I did. That doctor never used the term heart attack, referring to it as a “cardiac episode,” and then referred me to a cardiologist. He ran some other tests including a tiring and painful stress test that required colored fluid in my cardio-vascular system.
Although the cardiologist didn’t call it a heart attack (he called it a “cardiac episode) he prescribed treatment for heart problems and the insurance company then denied the treatment. It was a cardiac episode, not a heart attack and therefore didn’t qualify for the treatment.
So, I struggled to live life as normal for about a month, got sick with the flu a couple months later and, because taking that day off work after the heart attack was “unauthorized,” was terminated because I used too many sick days in that quarter.
After losing my job and my health insurance, I went to the V.A. to see my primary care person, a nurse practioner, and the first thing she said, after viewing my records from the private health care doctors, “You had a heart attack in January.”
That was the first time someone had used that term to describe my “cardiac episode.” How did the nurse practioner know it was a heart attack? Everything the private doctors wrote about the event and prescribed after the “cardiac episode” was specifically for heart attacks.
The health insurance companies are in it for the money. Our health is the least of their concerns. Leaving our health care in their hands is a recipe for the destruction for the American middle class. Health insurance now costs the average American family nearly 25% of their income. That is expected to double in the next 15 years if nothing is done to reform health care in America.
We pay more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation and the results don’t match that cost. We rank at the bottom of every measurable and important health category like life expectancy and infant mortality. And of course we have epidemics of obesity and Type II Diabetes. Health insurance companies already ration care, as they did with me and they have the ability to deny coverage to anyone for any reason.
Why are we even having a debate?
TheForkesReport