Suddenly Last Summer
A post from a guest blogger:
Suddenly last summer…
Exactly one year ago this morning, I found myself strapped into a rescue helicopter en route to UCLA Medical Center. It had been a little over an hour since a predatory black bear attempted to make a lunch of me, and I was determined to make it to the emergency room before I passed out–maybe for the last time. Both my father and my sister had gone to medical school at UCLA, and I knew that there I would be given top-notch care in a top-notch facility, with the help of the best technology in the history of the planet. But I also knew that should I somehow survive, I was in for years of hassle with the insurance companies that control the medical field– and I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to face that.
To their apparent chagrin, and thanks in significant part to the support of the community here at HBB, I did survive, and sure enough, this past year has been one maddening battle after another. Not with my medical treatment– which has been exemplary– but with the seventy-three layers of corporate and governmental middlemen between my doctors and my wallet. Middlemen who at every turn have attempted to second guess, inhibit, or outright oppose my physicians’ attempts to fix me.
I can’t help but feel the same about health insurers and their cozy little deals with the federal government as I do about Wall Street, fractional reserve banking, and the late lamented housing industry. The parallels between what happened to these institutions last summer and what is happening to health insurance companies today are ominous–and now it looks increasingly more likely that you and I will be called upon to bail them out too.
I wouldn’t be quite so aggrieved if I didn’t feel– as do so many of us here on HBB– that I am being punished for having done the responsible thing by maintaining an ever-more-expensive health insurance policy all these years, while others simply sat back and milked the system (a system paid for by our taxes and insurance premiums,) for medical care WE ourselves CANNOT AFFORD.
Sound familiar? This blog was founded upon such resentments. How is the well-documented greed, incompetence, and chicanery of America’s health insurers any different from that of the commercial banking or housing industry? Is Wellpoint CEO, Angela Braly, any less culpable than Countrywide’s Anthony Mozillo? Is the fine print of a health insurance policy any less obfuscating or weaseling than that of a credit card agreement?
I know I’m not the only person here who postponed buying a house for a couple of decades or so because I couldn’t afford both a mortgage, AND health insurance. Nor am I the only one with a major axe to grind against the health insurance behemoths who extort our money then renege on their contract.
Read my horror story –one among literally thousands of similarly egregious examples.
Not the housing collapse, not the credit crisis….
“…Everybody acknowledges that the single biggest threat to our fiscal stability is Medicare and Medicaid. It’s not even close. That is the single thing that could drive us into long-term staggering and difficult debt.” President Barack Obama on PBS NewsHour.
Obviously something must be done before millions of us retiring baby boomers overwhelm Social Security and Medicare and bankrupt what is left of our economy. While some on this blog might applaud the idea, it would probably be a hard sell getting the country to go along with exterminating everyone who turns 65, so reforming the health care system we have now seems a more reasoned alternative. Like it or not, we’re going to have to rethink our national policies on end-of-life care, elective procedures, and coverage of treatment for preventable illness and disabilities like obesity and diabetes. Expensive and redundant programs like Medicare Advantage– a $177B subsidy to the insurance companies– will cease. Employee health benefits will be treated as taxable income, and deductions for medical expenses will be reduced for upper income earners. And that’s just for starters.
As our government attempts to craft some sort of reform bill to address this latest Gordian knot, it is increasingly shaping up to be a battle between doctors (AMA,) nurses (ANA,) hospitals (FAH,), life-long taxpayers (AARP,) major employers (WalMart,) and even some pharmaceutical research companies, VS the “free market” health insurance industry. Just whose lobbyists will prevail is still an even bet….
No matter what the outcome, though, we all know they’re going to take our money–a lot of it. This much is a given. The question is; how and to whom should it be redistributed?
