Health Care Reform
I'm sure by now everyone has chosen their position on health care reform. Or maybe not since the whole shebang is up in the air.
As a reasonable, capable adult I experienced "the other side" of health care in our country and it is ugly.
When Andrew's freelance career turned into a full-fledged business of his own, with partners, I was able to stop working. I had provided health insurance for our family, so we applied for individual coverage.
Having had nice or decent health insurance coverage my entire adult life, I was shocked and horrified when both Annabella and I were declined coverage. Declined. Denied.
I was declined because I had high cholesterol. No one in the underwriting department seemed to care that my grandmother also had sky high cholesterol until she passed away at age 96. Doesn't matter. According to insurance underwriting high cholesterol correlates directly with heart disease, astronomical hospital bills, flying monkeys carrying baskets full of their dollar bills far, far away to the land of OZ or something.
But there I was, 34, no family history of heart disease. No high blood pressure. No diabetes. Nothing in the world to indicate impending doom, except high cholesterol. I'd already tried all the non-prescription methods to lower my cholesterol. I exercised, I ate a very healthy diet, and had tried taking garlic, cinnamon, niacin, flax oil, fish oil. You name it, I tried it. Nothing made much of a difference.
Believe me when I say I had experienced pressure from doctors to go on cholesterol lowering medication. I had one tell me, "If you want to be around to raise your daughter, you'd better start taking this now." Like I would die immediately, from the amount of cholesterol in my blood alone, if I didn't take the drugs. Wouldn't Annabella be sad. What a freakin' bitch that doctor was. OH MY GOD.
Why? Why did I not succumb? Because those drugs are UNSAFE if you are pregnant, may be come pregnant or are nursing. And I, nay, we, wanted another child. [So, yes, not only did we run the gauntlet of prematurity, preeclampsia, and HELLP Syndrome, but the looming doom of putting off treating my cholesterol with liver killing drugs...] So I wasn't about to start taking them and put off having another child. There was no information available about exactly how long they stay in your system or present a danger to your future children.
Annabella was also declined. Because she had been born prematurely. Never mind the fact that in the two years since she was released from the hospital she'd never had more than a cold or two. Never went back into the hospital. Never readmitted. For a 1 1/2 lb. micro-preemie that is amazing. Fan-freakin'-tastic. Unheard of. She didn't come home with an apnea monitor. Shocking. She came home on oxygen, not for her lungs but for her eyes. But within months the Retinopathy of Prematurity had resolved itself and the oxygen tank was gone, too. It didn't matter to the insurance company.
So, we were required to exhaust COBRA before a regular company would consider covering us. Anyone who has ever paid COBRA knows how painful that is. Imagine paying for the whole family for 18 months. AWESOME
You continue paying hundreds of dollars a month, but now your insurance doesn't cover office visits! And it doesn't cover immunizations! And it doesn't cover prescriptions! It doesn't cover CRAP until you've exhausted your $10,000 deductible! Who chooses a $10,000 deductible? I don't know, we had no choice. That is the only coverage we could get.
Why? Why would someone pay for that kind of coverage when they are clearly getting so little back? So that they don't go bankrupt because of cancer, surgery, having a premature baby, or any number of perfectly common things that tend to go wrong with the human body on a regular basis.
Believe me. It is painful to send a check, every month, without fail [because if you don't, you could lose the CRAP coverage you have and not be able to get ANY] and still be smacked in the face with a bill for $125 every time your child needs an office visit. I can totally see why someone would forego the insurance. It is crystal clear to me how this is unaffordable for many, many people.
So, when you're sitting back in your mansion, wondering what this could possibly have to do with you, consider this: 1 in 5 people in America have high cholesterol, rendering them essentially uninsurable. 1 in 8 babies are born prematurely. Those are just two of the many reasons you could be declined health insurance. If you think you'll never be affected by something that would make you uninsurable, think again.
Not enough reason to care? Maybe you imagine you'll always be covered at your job or your spouses job. You should be aware that employer-provided health insurance is on the decline. It has been for years. It costs employers and employees more than ever, for less and less coverage. With the job market at such a low point, many people are forced to work for smaller companies which can't afford to provide coverage or to work for themselves and find their own coverage.
These problems belong to all of us. This isn't just about taking money from the unaffected rich to pay for the care of the poor. This is about fixing a system that is broken from the top to the bottom, affecting everyone, of every means, eventually. Every day, hard-working, intelligent people are losing their lives, their livelihoods, their loved ones, their homes, their security, and their well-being because health insurance is out of control, out of their reach, or just plain unavailable and medical costs are just plain ridiculously high.
As a nation, we can ill afford to look down upon this problem from a lofty peak and say, "Not my problem, doesn't affect me, why should I have to do something to help someone else?"
