Sweetie,
The house is still empty without you. I moved, but I brought your absence with me. It follows me everywhere I go. I can see where we lived from my patio, and even walking past it reminds me again that you’re not here.
You’d like the new place, except for the two steps up from the sidewalk. They’re even hard for me to get up these days. Otherwise, it’s nice. I got rid of some things to fit everything in, but Bob’s chair and ottoman are in the living room. They look really nice.
You’d be happy.
I have your art on the walls, even though I haven’t finished unpacking yet. I got sidelined by my own health problems. The study is still a mess of boxes strewn everywhere. I’m going to try to unpack 2 more this weekend.
When I told Crystal that I was moving, she said “No! You good customer.” She was visibly relieved when I told her I was only moving a few feet away and would still be bringing her my dry cleaning. She gave me a calendar that I don’t use.
I never seem to know what day of the week or date it is. That hasn’t changed. I always relied on you for that information. As well as when bills were due.
Lucy still looks like a sausage stuffed into a tabby’s body. Only bigger. She’s as demanding as ever, and still hasn’t learned that I can’t turn off the cold or rainy weather. Or be home all day with her.
Amanda still spends most of her days curled up on the bed, the perfect kitty comma. She stays on you side more often than not. I don’t know if she can still smell you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were so.
I miss you most on the weekends. I’m home by myself with the cats. They haven’t changed: as demanding and spoiled as they way you left them.
They’re your fault.
I officially have high blood pressure, and when I told the doc that I’ve had a lot anxiety and stress over the last year or so, he asked me the question that I’m sure you got asked over and over: “Do you ever think about harming yourself or others”. I told him “No.”
If I had been thinking, I would have said “Yes. The person in front of me at the grocery who’s holding up the line over $3. Good thing I don’t like guns.
The doc was just doing his job, and I told him that I knew what depression was, and I wasn’t there. That I was profoundly sad, but not clinically depressed. I’ve been depressed, and I know what it tastes like.
Still, I miss you. Fiercely.
You’d be proud of me. I’m actually seeing doctors to take care of physical problems. I didn’t really take care of myself because I spent my time taking care of you and didn’t worry about me so much.
I never knew how frustrating it is to have to use a cane. It monopolizes one of my two hands. I can’t seem to get it propped up right when I need to use both hands. It’s life with one hand.
And I have a new-found appreciation of how awful nerve pain is. Sometimes the loose change in my pocket irritates the hell out of my leg. The burning has pretty much gone away since I got the cortisone injection, but my thigh is still mostly numb.
I’m doing what I need to, though. I have another MRI next week (this time on my hip), a follow-up with the pain doctor and another with the bone doctor after he’s seen the MRI. I’m sure that’s not the last of these appointments.
As I said, you’d be proud. And amazed. I’ve cost Aetna thousands and thousands of dollars, but much less than they’ve received for me over the years.
And M. is very supportive. I’ve taken more sick time for doctors’ appointments over the last month than I’ve taken since I had strep. I actually took a full day off because I hurt so much that I could barely get out of bed.
I miss you every day. I miss your cackle. Someone called your laugh “robust”, but it was a cackle, like a hen laying an egg. You were always a sucker for a throw-away line. I threw them out as often as possible just to hear it.
I miss you. All of you. Even the crazy parts. I didn’t love you in spite of the crazy: I loved you knowing that the crazy was there. I loved and continue to love you because of the man you were.
Say “Hi” to Rich for me, and tell him that I love him, too. Tell him that Sweet Pea loves him and misses him. He’ll know what that means.
I’ll see you both on the other side.
In the mean time, the two of you can talk about wood and argue about how to properly finish it. Get it out of your system, because I don’t want to spend eternity with the two of you bickering over that kind of stuff.
Visit when you want. But I won’t be long getting there in the grand scheme of things. And when I do, we’ll make a nice couple, the three of us.
29 January 2011
27 January 2011
Obama Cares
While the U.S. House of Representatives sits around wasting time debating a repeal of the health care overhaul, their constituents are getting sick and are unable to seek treatment because they have no health insurance. At least not until they have to be treated in an emergency room, where they can’t be turned away. Since the repeal has no chance being enacted, the representatives are piddling away time that could be better spent addressing the real problems and issues.
Instead, they choose to engage in political grandstanding and misinformation that rises to the level of propaganda on a grand scale. They use carefully scripted words and phrases (“Obamacare”, “job-killing”, “government power grab”, “takeover of health care”) that have no basis in reality. Unless they live on a planet where the sky is green and the truth is less important than a sound bite.
I’m lucky in that I have good health coverage, and it’s Aetna that determines the level of care I get, not the government. No one has taken over my health care, other than in that the insurance company can’t charge me for certain basic health services. That’s the “government takeover”.
And I think to only impact on jobs might be that hospitals might need fewer people in the ER, treating others less fortunate than me for something that a GP might have been able to treat before a problem became acute. And that’s not a bad thing: many hospitals would love to re-assign that particular staff to other duties. There is shortage of workers in most health care fields.
With costs to both insurers and the federal and state governments skyrocketing, the House should be talking about how to cut those costs. Study after study has shown that it’s cheaper to treat someone early than to treat them in the ER or ICU when he or she is acutely ill. ER and ICU treatment costs significantly more than early intervention.
At the core, the House is hypocritical: they have government-provided health insurance. They don’t mind pushing hot buttons, but they accept health care from the same entity that wants to provide the same quality of care to people that they profess to represent. All in the name of rabble-rousing.
I lived without health coverage for over a decade, and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t get too sick. If affordable care had been available, I probably would have signed on. But it wasn’t there.
I have good coverage now, but I have to wonder what I would do if I didn’t. I would have probably lived in pain as my blood pressure slowly inched up until I came to the breaking point and ended up in the ER, either seriously ill or dead.
The reality of the health care bill is that it good on all fronts. I keep my private coverage, and people not so lucky to have it get an opportunity to get something similar. The bill will save billions and trillions of dollars as the population ages and doesn’t need as much treatment because they were treated sooner rather than later.
The benefits are self-evident: affordable preventative treatment, earlier detection of problems through health screenings, fewer acute care patients that drive costs up and a higher quality of life for those that don’t currently have access to health care.
Ignoring those benefits and the long-term savings that have been confirmed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office strikes me as a political ploy to spin the issue into oblivion on the part of the House. I would like to ask them each, individually, if they’ve ever been without coverage. That is highly unlikely, I realize.
In the mean time, they toss out words and phrases designed to scare. I doubt that many of them have seen a $204,000 medical bill. That’s reality for a major health failure. Getting sick is easy; paying for it isn’t.
Legislating a way for people without coverage to get it is in no way a takeover. And mandating coverage is no different from states mandating liability insurance for car owners. Doing so serves a greater good, a position that the Supreme Court has affirmed over and over. It has consistently ruled that the government can impose requirements that benefit and advance a greater good.
The VA, which as little as 10 years ago was a model of inefficiency and waste, has transformed itself into one of the best health care providers in the country. And they’re run by the government.
On top of everything else, ignoring that singular fact paints most opponents of reform as either stupid, uninformed or opportunistic. They either don’t know because they don’t keep up or care to, or they don’t want to see what’s staring them in the face: a model that works.
Given the rhetoric from the far and even moderate right wing, I can only surmise that their motivations are opportunistic, painting the health care reform bill as massively unpopular among the American people. In fact, most polls show that that, while opinion is divided, it carries the support of a little less than 50% of those polled by non-partisan organizations. Opponents carry similar numbers.
Those numbers in no way justify a repeal, nor do they represent an overwhelming support for repeal. Rather, it represents the number of people who either lack coverage or know someone who does.
House Republicans are fighting a war they know they have no chance of winning to get press time. It’s free advertising for the individual members when the press covers the issue as closely as it does.
The pandering to the far right and the press ignores the basic question: why is health coverage available only for a certain demographic? What if I’m self-employed or run a small business that can’t afford the extremely high cost of covering myself or a small group of employees? What do you have to offer, instead? How are you going to control health care costs that are expanding almost geometrically?
So far, the answer to the last question is “we don’t know”. The answer to the prior is “we don’t know and we don’t care”.
The current debate, if you can call it one, boils down to a cynical attempt to scare people to forward the agenda of a political party at the expense of the uninsured people they are supposed to represent.
To them, I say “shame on you”. Take you rhetoric and put it where your heart ought to be.
Instead, they choose to engage in political grandstanding and misinformation that rises to the level of propaganda on a grand scale. They use carefully scripted words and phrases (“Obamacare”, “job-killing”, “government power grab”, “takeover of health care”) that have no basis in reality. Unless they live on a planet where the sky is green and the truth is less important than a sound bite.
I’m lucky in that I have good health coverage, and it’s Aetna that determines the level of care I get, not the government. No one has taken over my health care, other than in that the insurance company can’t charge me for certain basic health services. That’s the “government takeover”.
And I think to only impact on jobs might be that hospitals might need fewer people in the ER, treating others less fortunate than me for something that a GP might have been able to treat before a problem became acute. And that’s not a bad thing: many hospitals would love to re-assign that particular staff to other duties. There is shortage of workers in most health care fields.
With costs to both insurers and the federal and state governments skyrocketing, the House should be talking about how to cut those costs. Study after study has shown that it’s cheaper to treat someone early than to treat them in the ER or ICU when he or she is acutely ill. ER and ICU treatment costs significantly more than early intervention.
At the core, the House is hypocritical: they have government-provided health insurance. They don’t mind pushing hot buttons, but they accept health care from the same entity that wants to provide the same quality of care to people that they profess to represent. All in the name of rabble-rousing.
I lived without health coverage for over a decade, and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t get too sick. If affordable care had been available, I probably would have signed on. But it wasn’t there.
I have good coverage now, but I have to wonder what I would do if I didn’t. I would have probably lived in pain as my blood pressure slowly inched up until I came to the breaking point and ended up in the ER, either seriously ill or dead.
The reality of the health care bill is that it good on all fronts. I keep my private coverage, and people not so lucky to have it get an opportunity to get something similar. The bill will save billions and trillions of dollars as the population ages and doesn’t need as much treatment because they were treated sooner rather than later.
The benefits are self-evident: affordable preventative treatment, earlier detection of problems through health screenings, fewer acute care patients that drive costs up and a higher quality of life for those that don’t currently have access to health care.
Ignoring those benefits and the long-term savings that have been confirmed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office strikes me as a political ploy to spin the issue into oblivion on the part of the House. I would like to ask them each, individually, if they’ve ever been without coverage. That is highly unlikely, I realize.
In the mean time, they toss out words and phrases designed to scare. I doubt that many of them have seen a $204,000 medical bill. That’s reality for a major health failure. Getting sick is easy; paying for it isn’t.
Legislating a way for people without coverage to get it is in no way a takeover. And mandating coverage is no different from states mandating liability insurance for car owners. Doing so serves a greater good, a position that the Supreme Court has affirmed over and over. It has consistently ruled that the government can impose requirements that benefit and advance a greater good.
The VA, which as little as 10 years ago was a model of inefficiency and waste, has transformed itself into one of the best health care providers in the country. And they’re run by the government.
On top of everything else, ignoring that singular fact paints most opponents of reform as either stupid, uninformed or opportunistic. They either don’t know because they don’t keep up or care to, or they don’t want to see what’s staring them in the face: a model that works.
Given the rhetoric from the far and even moderate right wing, I can only surmise that their motivations are opportunistic, painting the health care reform bill as massively unpopular among the American people. In fact, most polls show that that, while opinion is divided, it carries the support of a little less than 50% of those polled by non-partisan organizations. Opponents carry similar numbers.
Those numbers in no way justify a repeal, nor do they represent an overwhelming support for repeal. Rather, it represents the number of people who either lack coverage or know someone who does.
House Republicans are fighting a war they know they have no chance of winning to get press time. It’s free advertising for the individual members when the press covers the issue as closely as it does.
The pandering to the far right and the press ignores the basic question: why is health coverage available only for a certain demographic? What if I’m self-employed or run a small business that can’t afford the extremely high cost of covering myself or a small group of employees? What do you have to offer, instead? How are you going to control health care costs that are expanding almost geometrically?
So far, the answer to the last question is “we don’t know”. The answer to the prior is “we don’t know and we don’t care”.
The current debate, if you can call it one, boils down to a cynical attempt to scare people to forward the agenda of a political party at the expense of the uninsured people they are supposed to represent.
To them, I say “shame on you”. Take you rhetoric and put it where your heart ought to be.
17 January 2011
Over and Over
The sad truth is that mental illness is the bastard stepchild of medical policy as seen by federal, state and even local governments. They seem to treat all mental illness as either laziness, addiction or a weakness of character while not realizing that many people who are lazy, addicted or weak of character are not mentally ill. They are simply lazy, addicted or weak.
Some are mentally ill, though. Their behavior is a symptom of the greater illness they suffer from. It’s not the cause. And for those people, getting treatment is almost impossible. Even if they want it.
Not long after I met Shannon, I found out about his history of mental illness, something that a psychiatrist who had known him since childhood and has become a dear friend to me told me about very bluntly. Shannon was in never-never land, ranting and raving and yelling and screaming, but he wasn’t a danger to himself or anyone else, so our friend told me, “Let’s go run an errand. You have an errand, don’t you?”
Before we got to the end of the block he told me the brutal, honest truth: Shannon was bipolar and had been all his life, but wouldn’t accept the diagnosis. I let out a sigh of relief, as I remember, because I finally had a name for what was going on. I knew there had to be a reason, but giving it a name made it much easier to deal with.
We got back from my “errand”, and I managed to get Shannon calm enough to sleep, and when he woke up a few hours later, he didn’t really remember much of what had happened. Our friend had already gone, and Shannon only vaguely remembered that he’d been there.
That’s when I told him that he was mentally ill and needed help of some sort. He resisted at first. He said people had been saying that for years, but he didn’t believe them. When I started pointing out the psycho things he’d done since I had known him, he started to come round.
I told him it wasn’t weakness, laziness or anything other than a health issue. One that he needed treatment for. That I’d had my own bouts with it, and that it’s real. I knew it was real. I told him about the time I found myself curled up in almost a fetal position at the end of a hall in college crying for no reason I could name. About planning my suicide.
I have an aversion to guns in general, and knives hurt, so I had chosen pills as my preferred method of self-euthanasia. And I certainly wasn’t going to set myself on fire. I was going to take an overdose of something and go to sleep.
For whatever reason, he listened to me after ignoring so many other people. He admitted that he might have an illness. Maybe it was the way I framed the discussion as purely health-related. Or that I told him my own history.
I don’t know. But he agreed to try to find help.
That’s when the fun began.
We quickly found out that there are few to none inexpensive options for treating mentally ill adults in our area. Even though we lived in a very liberal, open city, there are almost no mental health services available for less than $100/hr. Even when he got SSI, there were still almost none.
Then he applied for and got Veterans’ coverage based on his short stint in the Navy decades ago. It turns out that the VA has the biggest mental health business in town. It’s about the only place to find help if $100/hr. is too rich for your blood. They have an income-based fee schedule, and the expensive medication he needed suddenly became affordable. Shannon paid very little at first, and then nothing later on.
But he got the counseling and medication he needed to keep him sane. Finally. After years of denial, then acceptance and then being hit with roadblock after roadblock, he could be happy.
People wonder why the Tucson shooter didn’t get help or why someone didn’t intervene. It probably wouldn’t have mattered unless Tucson is very different than Austin. I’m in a larger metropolitan area, but at any given time, there are precious few beds available for mentally ill patients.
When Shannon had a couple of breakdowns, they put him in the CCU of a local hospital that had 1 mental health professional (a psychologist) on hand. There weren’t any beds at the psychiatric hospital, and it was not equipped to deal with his other health problems, anyway. He wasn’t healthy enough to go to the psychiatric facility, and the CCU had no real resources to deal with a mentally ill patient.
The one time he got into the psychiatric hospital, he ended up back at the other hospital because the psych folks neglected to get him his meds. I told him that I’d take care of him from there on out. And I did.
It meant wrestling him down and getting him to take a blood pressure pill and a sleeping pill, literally forcing them down his throat and holding his mouth closed so he wouldn’t spit them out because he was hallucinating. He always came back to the scenario where someone was trying to poison him. Once I got the pills down him, he was okay.
That’s the state of mental health care in the most open and liberal city in Texas. It’s okay to be gay and it’s okay to have any handicap other than mental illness. There are no readily available resources for people that don’t either know or want to admit that they’re mentally ill, much less the ones who realize it and want help. As if they would even be able to function on a high enough level to know how to find where to go for what little help there is or navigate the system once they found it.
Most mentally ill people lose the capacity to make the rational judgments that would lead them to seek care. And even in progressive communities, mental illness is still stigmatized, so there is an over-riding social pressure to pretend it’s not there. To pretend it’s not real.
I got up one morning and realized that Shannon hadn’t moved from the spot on the couch where he’d been when I went to bed the night before. He was staring blankly into space. I asked him if he knew where he was. He shook his head “no”. I asked if he knew who I was, and he shook his head “no” again. Then I asked him if he knew who he was. When he shook his “no” again, I knew we were in for a long day.
I assumed custodianship of his illness early on in our relationship and did my best to see that he had appropriate care and was treated with respect, even when he didn’t know who he was. Most mentally ill people don’t have that kind of an advocate. They simply wander through life alone.
And people don’t like to talk about it. It’s too dark and too scary a topic for most. They’d rather talk about cancer or drug addiction, two conditions that have lost the stigma that mental illness still carries. No one makes a conscious choice to get a tumor or become an addict, but neither does one make a choice to be mentally ill. They all suck, and no one would take any of them on voluntarily.
Until the stigma goes away and people talk about mental illness the same way they talk about lymphoma or rehab, Tucson will happen again, over and over. Until people realize that they have to intervene and take care of those they love, even when the one they love protests, it will happen again. Until there is widely available and adequate treatment, it will happen again.
Over and over.
Some are mentally ill, though. Their behavior is a symptom of the greater illness they suffer from. It’s not the cause. And for those people, getting treatment is almost impossible. Even if they want it.
Not long after I met Shannon, I found out about his history of mental illness, something that a psychiatrist who had known him since childhood and has become a dear friend to me told me about very bluntly. Shannon was in never-never land, ranting and raving and yelling and screaming, but he wasn’t a danger to himself or anyone else, so our friend told me, “Let’s go run an errand. You have an errand, don’t you?”
Before we got to the end of the block he told me the brutal, honest truth: Shannon was bipolar and had been all his life, but wouldn’t accept the diagnosis. I let out a sigh of relief, as I remember, because I finally had a name for what was going on. I knew there had to be a reason, but giving it a name made it much easier to deal with.
We got back from my “errand”, and I managed to get Shannon calm enough to sleep, and when he woke up a few hours later, he didn’t really remember much of what had happened. Our friend had already gone, and Shannon only vaguely remembered that he’d been there.
That’s when I told him that he was mentally ill and needed help of some sort. He resisted at first. He said people had been saying that for years, but he didn’t believe them. When I started pointing out the psycho things he’d done since I had known him, he started to come round.
I told him it wasn’t weakness, laziness or anything other than a health issue. One that he needed treatment for. That I’d had my own bouts with it, and that it’s real. I knew it was real. I told him about the time I found myself curled up in almost a fetal position at the end of a hall in college crying for no reason I could name. About planning my suicide.
I have an aversion to guns in general, and knives hurt, so I had chosen pills as my preferred method of self-euthanasia. And I certainly wasn’t going to set myself on fire. I was going to take an overdose of something and go to sleep.
For whatever reason, he listened to me after ignoring so many other people. He admitted that he might have an illness. Maybe it was the way I framed the discussion as purely health-related. Or that I told him my own history.
I don’t know. But he agreed to try to find help.
That’s when the fun began.
We quickly found out that there are few to none inexpensive options for treating mentally ill adults in our area. Even though we lived in a very liberal, open city, there are almost no mental health services available for less than $100/hr. Even when he got SSI, there were still almost none.
Then he applied for and got Veterans’ coverage based on his short stint in the Navy decades ago. It turns out that the VA has the biggest mental health business in town. It’s about the only place to find help if $100/hr. is too rich for your blood. They have an income-based fee schedule, and the expensive medication he needed suddenly became affordable. Shannon paid very little at first, and then nothing later on.
But he got the counseling and medication he needed to keep him sane. Finally. After years of denial, then acceptance and then being hit with roadblock after roadblock, he could be happy.
People wonder why the Tucson shooter didn’t get help or why someone didn’t intervene. It probably wouldn’t have mattered unless Tucson is very different than Austin. I’m in a larger metropolitan area, but at any given time, there are precious few beds available for mentally ill patients.
When Shannon had a couple of breakdowns, they put him in the CCU of a local hospital that had 1 mental health professional (a psychologist) on hand. There weren’t any beds at the psychiatric hospital, and it was not equipped to deal with his other health problems, anyway. He wasn’t healthy enough to go to the psychiatric facility, and the CCU had no real resources to deal with a mentally ill patient.
The one time he got into the psychiatric hospital, he ended up back at the other hospital because the psych folks neglected to get him his meds. I told him that I’d take care of him from there on out. And I did.
It meant wrestling him down and getting him to take a blood pressure pill and a sleeping pill, literally forcing them down his throat and holding his mouth closed so he wouldn’t spit them out because he was hallucinating. He always came back to the scenario where someone was trying to poison him. Once I got the pills down him, he was okay.
That’s the state of mental health care in the most open and liberal city in Texas. It’s okay to be gay and it’s okay to have any handicap other than mental illness. There are no readily available resources for people that don’t either know or want to admit that they’re mentally ill, much less the ones who realize it and want help. As if they would even be able to function on a high enough level to know how to find where to go for what little help there is or navigate the system once they found it.
Most mentally ill people lose the capacity to make the rational judgments that would lead them to seek care. And even in progressive communities, mental illness is still stigmatized, so there is an over-riding social pressure to pretend it’s not there. To pretend it’s not real.
I got up one morning and realized that Shannon hadn’t moved from the spot on the couch where he’d been when I went to bed the night before. He was staring blankly into space. I asked him if he knew where he was. He shook his head “no”. I asked if he knew who I was, and he shook his head “no” again. Then I asked him if he knew who he was. When he shook his “no” again, I knew we were in for a long day.
I assumed custodianship of his illness early on in our relationship and did my best to see that he had appropriate care and was treated with respect, even when he didn’t know who he was. Most mentally ill people don’t have that kind of an advocate. They simply wander through life alone.
And people don’t like to talk about it. It’s too dark and too scary a topic for most. They’d rather talk about cancer or drug addiction, two conditions that have lost the stigma that mental illness still carries. No one makes a conscious choice to get a tumor or become an addict, but neither does one make a choice to be mentally ill. They all suck, and no one would take any of them on voluntarily.
Until the stigma goes away and people talk about mental illness the same way they talk about lymphoma or rehab, Tucson will happen again, over and over. Until people realize that they have to intervene and take care of those they love, even when the one they love protests, it will happen again. Until there is widely available and adequate treatment, it will happen again.
Over and over.
05 January 2011
Let's Talk
For the past month or so, I’ve been dealing with pain, numbness and weakness in and around my right knee. It’s absolutely maddening: I have to walk with a cane, my thigh intermittently burns like it’s on fire, anything touching it causes pain and my foot alternates between mostly numb and uncomfortably tingly. I love walking by myself during the day because there’s a certain Zen involved: I put my mind in neutral and let it go where it wants. I can’t do that right now.
I saw my primary care physician, and he referred me to a neurologist who gave me a very thorough exam while I alternately sat and reclined on an exam table in my underwear. (Two things about neurologists that have been my experience: I’ll eventually end up in my drawers, and they don’t work between Christmas and New Year’s.) The neurologist ordered 2 MRI’s, an EMG and a nerve conductivity test, which I had this week.
Nothing like spending an hour in a narrow tube inside a giant noisy machine or another hour on an exam table being shocked with electrodes and needles. The only thing that could be worse would be suffering through it all and paying full price for the experience.
Luckily, I have an increasingly rare benefit: good health insurance. My co-pays range from $10 to $15 per visit and test and from $10 to $30 for prescriptions. So far, I’ve shelled out $70 for what would have cost $4,000 to $5,000 without insurance. Since my insurer has collected about $70,000 from me and my employer over the last decade and the insurer has paid out about $10,000, I don’t feel so bad about using the benefit.
The level of treatment I have received isn’t available to a too-large number of people. If they have coverage, their out-of-pocket expenses for something like this would either be prohibitive or eat up too much of their income. If I had to pay 20% of everything up to a deductible cap, I wouldn’t be able to afford it. If I had to pay the much higher co-pays, I’d have to be choosing among which bills to pay.
My insurer doesn’t offer our policy any more. They discontinued it several years ago, but they will renew it with an annual price adjustment. Policies like mine almost don’t exist today. My insurer will renew it, but they haven’t issued new ones in years.
The basic healthcare that I take for granted isn’t available to millions. The good healthcare I value so highly is available to even fewer. And that’s a basic inequity. I have a good job with good insurance, so I can afford the care. Too many people don’t have that. They can’t afford to go to the doctor for minor things, much less larger ones.
Now that universal healthcare is back in the news, I’ve been thinking about why it’s important, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the benefits outweigh the price. Emergency rooms don’t get over-run with people who really need to see a GP but can’t. The ERs’ costs go down. Healthy workers are more productive. And critical and end-of-life care costs go down because people don’t come to the hospital on their deathbeds.
Empirical evidence suggests that it’s much cheaper to treat potentially fatal or debilitating illnesses and diseases when they are diagnosed early on. Common sense dictates that a healthy worker is a more productive worker (unless the illness is pure old laziness).
The cost of no insurance is infinitely higher than the cost of having it. 2 weeks in the ICU can easily cost $200,000. If insurance pays for most of it, the hospital has that much more towards not going broke. And regardless of who the insurer is, as long as it’s not the government, the private insurer will make a profit in the long run.
The biggest lie, distortion and cynical spin on any legislation in my lifetime has been the “government takeover of healthcare”. The government won’t be running much of it. It’s mandated certain coverage, but my state mandates that I have liability insurance on my car. They don’t care if I have comp and collision because that doesn’t impact anyone but me.
The lack of available healthcare harms everyone, whether they have insurance or not. If I wreck my car and don’t have the comp and collision, it doesn’t affect anyone but me. If I don’t have health insurance and rely on emergency rooms for primary care or don’t seek treatment until my condition is critical, everyone pays. They pay in the form of higher costs across the board.
I lived for years without any coverage, and my company’s health insurance makes up for a lot other shortcomings on their part. There hasn’t been money for a raise in a few years, but I still have my health insurance. It costs only slightly more than what I paid the last time I got a raise.
The Sarah Palins of the world talk about “death panels” and socialized medicine. The reform act under attack meets neither criterion. It does provide funding for end-of-life counseling, but that’s a good thing. When my father died, the hospital provided counseling so we could make the right decisions. The ones we needed to make but didn’t want to.
My family needed to hear a half-dozen doctors from many specialties tell us how bad he was and why he was going to die, whether we did anything or not. He might have made it a few more days, but the unanimous decision was to cut life support. That’s a “death panel”. I’m glad we had one.
I still don’t understand the resistance to healthcare reform. Maybe people think it’s going to cost them more, but they’ll pay for it one way or another. Whether it’s in the form of higher medical bills, health insurance costs or taxes, we’ll all pay. And the tactics of fear mongering and rabble-rousing that politicians have employed to oppose extending care to more people strike me as both insincere and elitist. They spin an important issue for political advantage (the insincere part) and don’t care about the enormity of the healthcare problem (the elitist part).
They have insurance, so why should they care? And fear is one of the strongest political motivators, so they use is any time they can. It boils down to the politics of indifference and fear.
It’s time to end the politically motivated politics of fear and talk about reality.
I saw my primary care physician, and he referred me to a neurologist who gave me a very thorough exam while I alternately sat and reclined on an exam table in my underwear. (Two things about neurologists that have been my experience: I’ll eventually end up in my drawers, and they don’t work between Christmas and New Year’s.) The neurologist ordered 2 MRI’s, an EMG and a nerve conductivity test, which I had this week.
Nothing like spending an hour in a narrow tube inside a giant noisy machine or another hour on an exam table being shocked with electrodes and needles. The only thing that could be worse would be suffering through it all and paying full price for the experience.
Luckily, I have an increasingly rare benefit: good health insurance. My co-pays range from $10 to $15 per visit and test and from $10 to $30 for prescriptions. So far, I’ve shelled out $70 for what would have cost $4,000 to $5,000 without insurance. Since my insurer has collected about $70,000 from me and my employer over the last decade and the insurer has paid out about $10,000, I don’t feel so bad about using the benefit.
The level of treatment I have received isn’t available to a too-large number of people. If they have coverage, their out-of-pocket expenses for something like this would either be prohibitive or eat up too much of their income. If I had to pay 20% of everything up to a deductible cap, I wouldn’t be able to afford it. If I had to pay the much higher co-pays, I’d have to be choosing among which bills to pay.
My insurer doesn’t offer our policy any more. They discontinued it several years ago, but they will renew it with an annual price adjustment. Policies like mine almost don’t exist today. My insurer will renew it, but they haven’t issued new ones in years.
The basic healthcare that I take for granted isn’t available to millions. The good healthcare I value so highly is available to even fewer. And that’s a basic inequity. I have a good job with good insurance, so I can afford the care. Too many people don’t have that. They can’t afford to go to the doctor for minor things, much less larger ones.
Now that universal healthcare is back in the news, I’ve been thinking about why it’s important, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the benefits outweigh the price. Emergency rooms don’t get over-run with people who really need to see a GP but can’t. The ERs’ costs go down. Healthy workers are more productive. And critical and end-of-life care costs go down because people don’t come to the hospital on their deathbeds.
Empirical evidence suggests that it’s much cheaper to treat potentially fatal or debilitating illnesses and diseases when they are diagnosed early on. Common sense dictates that a healthy worker is a more productive worker (unless the illness is pure old laziness).
The cost of no insurance is infinitely higher than the cost of having it. 2 weeks in the ICU can easily cost $200,000. If insurance pays for most of it, the hospital has that much more towards not going broke. And regardless of who the insurer is, as long as it’s not the government, the private insurer will make a profit in the long run.
The biggest lie, distortion and cynical spin on any legislation in my lifetime has been the “government takeover of healthcare”. The government won’t be running much of it. It’s mandated certain coverage, but my state mandates that I have liability insurance on my car. They don’t care if I have comp and collision because that doesn’t impact anyone but me.
The lack of available healthcare harms everyone, whether they have insurance or not. If I wreck my car and don’t have the comp and collision, it doesn’t affect anyone but me. If I don’t have health insurance and rely on emergency rooms for primary care or don’t seek treatment until my condition is critical, everyone pays. They pay in the form of higher costs across the board.
I lived for years without any coverage, and my company’s health insurance makes up for a lot other shortcomings on their part. There hasn’t been money for a raise in a few years, but I still have my health insurance. It costs only slightly more than what I paid the last time I got a raise.
The Sarah Palins of the world talk about “death panels” and socialized medicine. The reform act under attack meets neither criterion. It does provide funding for end-of-life counseling, but that’s a good thing. When my father died, the hospital provided counseling so we could make the right decisions. The ones we needed to make but didn’t want to.
My family needed to hear a half-dozen doctors from many specialties tell us how bad he was and why he was going to die, whether we did anything or not. He might have made it a few more days, but the unanimous decision was to cut life support. That’s a “death panel”. I’m glad we had one.
I still don’t understand the resistance to healthcare reform. Maybe people think it’s going to cost them more, but they’ll pay for it one way or another. Whether it’s in the form of higher medical bills, health insurance costs or taxes, we’ll all pay. And the tactics of fear mongering and rabble-rousing that politicians have employed to oppose extending care to more people strike me as both insincere and elitist. They spin an important issue for political advantage (the insincere part) and don’t care about the enormity of the healthcare problem (the elitist part).
They have insurance, so why should they care? And fear is one of the strongest political motivators, so they use is any time they can. It boils down to the politics of indifference and fear.
It’s time to end the politically motivated politics of fear and talk about reality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)