While I was somewhat pleased that the Obama White House signed last year's health care reform bill, because something was better than nothing at all, still, I wish that it had been more comprehensive in addressing some of the more serious issues facing health care today. It keeps in place the private insurers who profit from people paying their premiums and then denying claims when they are filed. It does some good things, true, like it prevents insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions (but what about adults? Doesn't go there, unfortunately...), it removes the cap on lifetime care amounts and it covers some high risk patients who could otherwise not get insurance, but they STILL have to go to private insurers for their business. So while I was pleased at some of the reforms, still, it doesn't address the problem that so many of us who have employer provided health care are facing these days, and that is sharply diminished health care benefits. Sure, we pay our premiums, but more and more employers find that they can only afford to offer minimal coverage with high deductibles and co-pays, leaving the patient with the onus of having to pay enormous out of pocket health care costs. With most of us watching our salaries flatten or diminish over the past 30 years, having to fork over atrocious amounts of money to pay medical costs is just not possible. So what do most people end up doing as a result? They wait until they extremely sick before seeking medical attention, by which time they require expensive and advanced care. This is not cost effective in the long run. I find myself at this point in my life being one illness or injury away from bankruptcy. Last night, my mother took ill and needed to to the hospital for treatment. The registrar came into her ER room to have her fill out some paperwork and pay an ER co-pay, which is, in her case, $50. Aetna recently took over her Medicare and she's now in a private insurance Medicare PPO program with co-pays and deductibles, but her bill would be far less than mine would be should I get sick. My ER co-pay is now $200 (what I wouldn't do for an ER co-pay like my mom's!) and whatever treatments I received in the ER would be counted toward my now $4000 deductible, so an ER visit could mean running up huge bills that I would be paying for years to come. For all my insurance pays for, which is nothing anymore, I may as well have NO insurance, and in fact, I now consider myself to be uninsured because throughout the year, I pay all of my own medical bills out of pocket, which is obscenely expensive. My pay, on the other hand, has remained stagnant for years and in fact, has been sharply reduced with every passing year I stay on the job. I made more 5 years ago than I make now, when you factor in rising prices on everything. I have a full time public service career that I have been with for 28 years now. I always imagined that if I worked hard, got to college, completed my degree (which I did, at Kent State, earning a BA in 1979), that I would get a job that meant the longer I stayed, the better pay I would receive. After 28 years, to watch my salary be reduced with each passing year, and with health care costs skyrocketing out of control and almost no insurance left, what am I to do if I get sick or hurt? I live in mortal fear of illness or sickness. I'm one illness or injury away from bankruptcy. When is this country EVER going to join the rest of the industrialized world, put its people first and offer universal single payer health care? That is the health care reform we need, not that patchwork thing you all passed last year. Please listen to the voices of nurses, doctors and patients all begging for single payer health care. This is the only way that we can have a healthy nation where our people can know that they will be taken care of should they get sick or hurt. We are the ONLY country in the world where people file medical bankruptcies. What does that say about our national priorities? Put people before profits. Single payer health care is the ONLY answer to health care reform. Anything less is not adequate. We need single payer health care NOW. Now, why is it that the US is the ONLY nation in the world where people go bankrupt because they could not afford their medical bills? There is something terribly wrong with our national priorities when our country refuses to offer a national health plan like every single industrialized nation in the world.
Were I to end up in a hospital emergency room (heaven forbid!), I would be charged a $200 co-pay. Now, that would cover the ER cost, but if they needed to run any tests, which is an inevitability in an ER since they need to find out what is wrong with you so that they can treat you, I would be forced to pay the costs of tests plus the physician's fee, meaning that an ER visit could end up costing me thousands of dollars that I would have to spend years paying off. Lacking my full medical history as well, they would need me to fill out a pile of useless paperwork detailing my entire medical history since they lack access to my primary care doctor's records, which are still kept in old fashioned paper folders and done in pen and ink. Now, here is part of the problem: whenever I see any new doctor, I have to fill out a fat wad of paperwork detailing my entire medical history plus a wad of paper agreeing to be the financially responsible party for my treatment. Go into any doctor office and you will see huge walls of file folders full of patient medical histories. Why, I wonder, are medical offices still using 20th century technology in the 21st century? Why not create electronic, easily accessible medical records? I should, whenever I visit a doctor office, be able to have all of my records stored in an online database kept my my insurer that the medical office could then punch in: Patient has SummaCare insurance, go to the SummaCare database, punch in my name plus a security feature that insures that only authorized people could access the database, then access my entire medical history and records instead of wasting time with mountains of useless and time consuming paperwork. Or better still, according to T.R. Reid in his excellent book,
The Healing of America, in Europe you get a card encoded with your entire medical history on it that you present to a doctor's office, who then puts it into a computer where it can be retrieved and read. If Europe has this sort of advanced technology, why are OUR doctor offices still mired down in old fashioned pen and paper record keeping? Does anybody realize how wasteful and time consuming this is? Why can't we just have a national health care card like in Europe with all of your medical information encoded in it? That way, even if I ended up in an ER, unconscious, that card could be retrieved from my purse or whatever, the medical history could then be accessed by the ER staff and they would then know how to proceed and thus make fewer errors. It all makes perfect sense. I just don't know why Americans are so resistant to the idea of better health care and why they want to stick to a system that is not sustainable in the long run. Maybe they are just afraid of the unknown, or of change. Either way, I rather doubt that much of anything's going to change anytime soon with regard to American health care. Once it becomes apparent how fiscally unsustainable it really is, and once our economy really begins to wobble under the burdensome cost of rising health care costs, then maybe people will wake up and pay attention. And when employers are forced in larger numbers to drop their health insurance coverage, or only offer the barest of minimum coverage, then maybe people will pay attention when more and more of us find ourselves paying our own health care costs out of pocket. Until then, I am none too optimistic that much of anything will change anytime soon, if ever.
While I was somewhat pleased that the Obama White House signed last year's health care reform bill, because something was better than nothing at all, still, I wish that it had been more comprehensive in addressing some of the more serious issues facing health care today. It keeps in place the private insurers who profit from people paying their premiums and then denying claims when they are filed. It does some good things, true, like it prevents insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions (but what about adults? Doesn't go there, unfortunately...), it removes the cap on lifetime care amounts and it covers some high risk patients who could otherwise not get insurance, but they STILL have to go to private insurers for their business. So while I was pleased at some of the reforms, still, it doesn't address the problem that so many of us who have employer provided health care are facing these days, and that is sharply diminished health care benefits. Sure, we pay our premiums, but more and more employers find that they can only afford to offer minimal coverage with high deductibles and co-pays, leaving the patient with the onus of having to pay enormous out of pocket health care costs. With most of us watching our salaries flatten or diminish over the past 30 years, having to fork over atrocious amounts of money to pay medical costs is just not possible. So what do most people end up doing as a result? They wait until they extremely sick before seeking medical attention, by which time they require expensive and advanced care. This is not cost effective in the long run. I find myself at this point in my life being one illness or injury away from bankruptcy. Last night, my mother took ill and needed to to the hospital for treatment. The registrar came into her ER room to have her fill out some paperwork and pay an ER co-pay, which is, in her case, $50. Aetna recently took over her Medicare and she's now in a private insurance Medicare PPO program with co-pays and deductibles, but her bill would be far less than mine would be should I get sick. My ER co-pay is now $200 (what I wouldn't do for an ER co-pay like my mom's!) and whatever treatments I received in the ER would be counted toward my now $4000 deductible, so an ER visit could mean running up huge bills that I would be paying for years to come. For all my insurance pays for, which is nothing anymore, I may as well have NO insurance, and in fact, I now consider myself to be uninsured because throughout the year, I pay all of my own medical bills out of pocket, which is obscenely expensive. My pay, on the other hand, has remained stagnant for years and in fact, has been sharply reduced with every passing year I stay on the job. I made more 5 years ago than I make now, when you factor in rising prices on everything. I have a full time public service career that I have been with for 28 years now. I always imagined that if I worked hard, got to college, completed my degree (which I did, at Kent State, earning a BA in 1979), that I would get a job that meant the longer I stayed, the better pay I would receive. After 28 years, to watch my salary be reduced with each passing year, and with health care costs skyrocketing out of control and almost no insurance left, what am I to do if I get sick or hurt? I live in mortal fear of illness or sickness. I'm one illness or injury away from bankruptcy. When is this country EVER going to join the rest of the industrialized world, put its people first and offer universal single payer health care? That is the health care reform we need, not that patchwork thing you all passed last year. Please listen to the voices of nurses, doctors and patients all begging for single payer health care. This is the only way that we can have a healthy nation where our people can know that they will be taken care of should they get sick or hurt. We are the ONLY country in the world where people file medical bankruptcies. What does that say about our national priorities? Put people before profits. Single payer health care is the ONLY answer to health care reform. Anything less is not adequate. We need single payer health care NOW. Now, why is it that the US is the ONLY nation in the world where people go bankrupt because they could not afford their medical bills? There is something terribly wrong with our national priorities when our country refuses to offer a national health plan like every single industrialized nation in the world.
Were I to end up in a hospital emergency room (heaven forbid!), I would be charged a $200 co-pay. Now, that would cover the ER cost, but if they needed to run any tests, which is an inevitability in an ER since they need to find out what is wrong with you so that they can treat you, I would be forced to pay the costs of tests plus the physician's fee, meaning that an ER visit could end up costing me thousands of dollars that I would have to spend years paying off. Lacking my full medical history as well, they would need me to fill out a pile of useless paperwork detailing my entire medical history since they lack access to my primary care doctor's records, which are still kept in old fashioned paper folders and done in pen and ink. Now, here is part of the problem: whenever I see any new doctor, I have to fill out a fat wad of paperwork detailing my entire medical history plus a wad of paper agreeing to be the financially responsible party for my treatment. Go into any doctor office and you will see huge walls of file folders full of patient medical histories. Why, I wonder, are medical offices still using 20th century technology in the 21st century? Why not create electronic, easily accessible medical records? I should, whenever I visit a doctor office, be able to have all of my records stored in an online database kept my my insurer that the medical office could then punch in: Patient has SummaCare insurance, go to the SummaCare database, punch in my name plus a security feature that insures that only authorized people could access the database, then access my entire medical history and records instead of wasting time with mountains of useless and time consuming paperwork. Or better still, according to T.R. Reid in his excellent book, The Healing of America, in Europe you get a card encoded with your entire medical history on it that you present to a doctor's office, who then puts it into a computer where it can be retrieved and read. If Europe has this sort of advanced technology, why are OUR doctor offices still mired down in old fashioned pen and paper record keeping? Does anybody realize how wasteful and time consuming this is? Why can't we just have a national health care card like in Europe with all of your medical information encoded in it? That way, even if I ended up in an ER, unconscious, that card could be retrieved from my purse or whatever, the medical history could then be accessed by the ER staff and they would then know how to proceed and thus make fewer errors. It all makes perfect sense. I just don't know why Americans are so resistant to the idea of better health care and why they want to stick to a system that is not sustainable in the long run. Maybe they are just afraid of the unknown, or of change. Either way, I rather doubt that much of anything's going to change anytime soon with regard to American health care. Once it becomes apparent how fiscally unsustainable it really is, and once our economy really begins to wobble under the burdensome cost of rising health care costs, then maybe people will wake up and pay attention. And when employers are forced in larger numbers to drop their health insurance coverage, or only offer the barest of minimum coverage, then maybe people will pay attention when more and more of us find ourselves paying our own health care costs out of pocket. Until then, I am none too optimistic that much of anything will change anytime soon, if ever.
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