Darkly Comical Health Insurance

Image by Vlastula via Flickr

This is my letter to the White House

8/22/09

To President Barack Obama

I have listened to the debate on health reform quietly but now I can see the writing on the wall. The entire civilized world (excluding the United States) has health insurance for everyone.

My wife and I had our first health insurance plan in 1973(Golden Rule). We never missed a payment. (We have never missed a health insurance payment in 36 years.)

In 1992 I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Fighting for my health care from our carrier was almost a full time job for my wife. I had surgery and six months of chemotherapy. I actually preferred cancer to fighting the health insurance battle.

The next year our health care (with the same carrier) doubled. We went to the insurance commissioner in Florida and we were informed that the commissioner’s job was not to represent citizens but to prevent fraud.

Our health carrier kept raising our fees until we were forced to change companies.

The first year in our new company (Blue Cross) the price was less, but then they raised our fees prodigiously until we were forced to the next company.

This bait-and-switch process went on until finally my wife went with one insurance carrier and I went with a lovely little company by the name of Megahealth. Basically I paid almost $600 per month and what I got was negotiated prices.

Megahealth has a manipulative policy of raising fees, Increasing your deductable and finally forcing you to pay a $5000 deductible for each medical incident.

I have not had to have any further cancer treatment since 1992, yet I have the stigma and it effects me 18 years later. Shouldn’t there be some point where they admit you’re cured? My doctor says at this point I have no higher chance of recurrence than a “normal” person.

I finally realized I was paying so much that I couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. I couldn’t afford my medications.

At 58 years of age I told them to kiss off and now I have no health insurance.

At this point I’m a cancer survivor and I have type-two diabetes. No insurance company my wife has contacted will cover me. They simply state that I’m not eligible.

It makes me angry because if I had avoided ever paying a health insurance company for 36 years and banked or invested the money I could fund my own health insurance plan. If I had understood the way insurance carriers worked I would not have played their game. There is a reason they hire actuaries and have big buildings.

It’s my understanding that 10% of the employed people in the United States work for some type of insurance company. If this is true, what do they produce? What’s their product?

If you have any assets and you have no health insurance then you pay much higher fees. In other words you subsidize the insured patients. An MRI for my insured father was $1400 and an MRI for me was $5600. Where is the fairness in that? Should an MRI cost 4x as much for the uninsured as the insured?

My wife and I have determined that our best tactic in dealing with the situation if nothing is done is to get a divorce (We’ve been happily married 39 years this September) and put everything in my wife’s name. Then I will qualify for care without losing everything we have worked for.

While we appreciate all that President Obama is attempting we believe the United States is run by lobbyists and Congressmen and Senators whose votes have been purchased by campaign contributions and political favors.

One way out of this mess is that our Senators and Congressmen should voluntarily give up their health benefits and be forced to go into the marketplace to purchase health insurance. Otherwise they will never understand that 58 year-old cancer survivors are not lazy and feckless. It seems incongruent to me that a Senator or Congressman can serve one term and have health insurance benefits for life.

People who never have a serious medical problem are not marked with the scarlet C. For the most part they pay their health insurance and go merrily along. This pleases the health insurance companies as their monthly payments translate into high profitability.

My other suggestion is that everyone who doesn’t have health insurance should march on Washington and camp out on the mall in a peaceful manner until our Senators and Congressmen see the extent of the problem.

I believe you should call for such a march to shut down Washington D.C. until our Senators and Congressmen understand that they serve at the will of the voters and not the will of the lobbyist $$$$s.

Do you have better suggestions?

Sincerely,
Alan H. Bush

Related articles by Zemanta

• "The reality is if you get real sick, no matter if you're insured or not, you're probably financially f**ked." (americablog.com)