A World Together?
Health care, not just insurance
by Sue Saltmarsh
These days we hear a lot about people coming together to create positive change. This when many of us individually are feeling, more urgently than ever, alone, abandoned, overwhelmed, desperate. Even though conventional wisdom tells us that money can’t buy happiness, most of the people I know, myself included, would be a helluva lot happier if we had some.
This became even more crystal clear to me on August 15th when my body gave me a lesson I could not ignore or deny. After a trip to the emergency room and four days in the hospital without the benefit of health insurance, I now have a $30,000 bill to pay—more than I bring home in a year. And yet, they tell me I “make too much” to qualify for assistance. I’ve sent pages of forms in to the hospital committee that decides who is going to get a break on their bill and am waiting for their verdict.
Though I’ve worked in the HIV/AIDS community for almost 20 years, I have myself been blessed with fairly good health, so when the company insurance raised the deductible to $1,000 and our contribution to $50 twice monthly, neither of which was “affordable” for me, I cancelled it. So much for the $3,600 I’d paid into the system over the last three years. Pocket change for the AIG guys, but a significant, and sorely missed, chunk of my earnings down the drain.
As I contemplate a future during which the fibroids in my uterus may necessitate a hysterectomy and my Type II diabetes may slide from the current managed state into some sort of crisis, I find myself in what I imagine to be a similar trap to the one HIV-positive folks deal with—either we pay dearly for insurance and then have co-pays and deductibles on top of the premium as well as insurance companies refusing to pay for treatment, we rely on “other” sources for our meds and on the charity of doctors and hospitals, or we just give up and let Nature take its course. Especially for people like me who make up what was formerly the “middle class,” there is no such thing as a “free clinic” and the so-called sliding scale is no more affordable than insurance premiums. Mr. Bush, who is going to bail us out? Where is our “golden parachute”? Where is any kind of parachute for us?
Hearing reports of the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, I was inspired to think, “What if all the people who came to that conference, all the people of the world, HIV-positive or not, cancer patients, diabetics, heart disease sufferers, arthritics, and all who carry within them some sort of health problem were to get together and say, ‘No more!’ What if we could create a world in which health care, not health insurance, was everyone’s right?” So many countries have done it already that it doesn’t seem that impossible.
But of course, such a monumental undertaking would require surgical removal of the idea that people should be able to profit from the illness and suffering of others. Let me make clear that I totally support doctors, nurses, paramedics, and all other kinds of medical practitioners in their right to make a better living than I do—they have, after all, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their lives in their education and training. But what I would like to see is the end of those who are in it for the money, who will never be true healers. I would also like to see medical science and pharmaceutical research supported and encouraged, but what’s wrong with a motive like altruism both from the folks doing the research and the governments that should give them abundant support? I don’t know about you, but I would much rather pay the $100 I’m now paying every month for insurance to the IRS than my $3,000 share (yes, folks, that’s what it’s going to cost each and every taxpayer to save Wall Street) of the current financial bail out plan if I knew that I could go to my internist any time without worrying about how I’m going to pay for it. Is this possible? I don’t know, but if anyone out there wants to give it a try, I’m in.
Breathe deep, live long (or at least until you get your insurance’s worth!)
Discuss this column in our new discussion forum
|
