We’ve written plenty of stories about people who have found themselves at their financial wit’s end. It may be from a catastrophic illness, or the unexpected tragic death of a young one, cut down in the prime of life. The stories that end with families and friends asking for community help in medical, or worse, burial costs through the Gofundme website, are incredibly heartrending and heartbreaking. When the community comes out to help, it’s heartwarming.
But you know what it isn’t? It isn’t healthcare.
Even decades before the present apocalypse, now at its one-year anniversary, reared its spiky head, healthcare and health insurance were their own evil apocalypses in this country. Other developed nations have figured out universal healthcare even as our for-profit health insurance industry has drowned many citizens in oceans of debt.
COVID-19 put a floodlight on the problem we have oxymoronically complained about and continued to ignore. We continually elect government representatives who answer to the big-moneyed insurance lobby more than they answer to their constituents. Our representatives, part of the “big government” they claim can’t handle healthcare for all (but take government healthcare for themselves) keep repeating the lie that Medicare for All won’t work because people like their insurance companies and won’t trust the government to properly distribute money needed for healthcare.
The secret, that isn’t either dirty or little, is that many of us don’t like our private insurance companies. We like our doctors. Chances are if you have a decent insurance plan, subsidized through your job, you’re grateful, but not giddy. You still have to deal with co-pays, deductibles, referrals from your primary care physician to see a specialist, in- or out-of-network worries, exploding drug prices, and the chance that you will have to switch insurance companies in another year or so as costs rise yet again. And if you also don’t like your job, you have to decide how long you will stay, because that’s the only way you can get insurance. COBRA (which stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) is a nightmare, as anyone who has tried to navigate staying on their former employer’s insurance plan can attest.
Over my four decade-plus work history, I’ve had more insurance plans than I’ve had jobs (and I’ve worked in jobs from the left coast to this one). Some companies were easier to deal with than others. Some insisted on office visits before referrals for specialists, which meant I had to pay the office co-pay so a doctor or physician’s assistant could tell me they couldn’t help me, and then send me to a specialist (which is what I wanted in the first place), where I would then have to pay another, higher, co-pay.
Some companies would reject any claim, in or out of network, and then I’d have to spend hours on the phone and have my doctor’s office do the same, before the insurance plan I paid into would pony up the payments they swore they covered. One company would routinely reject every single claim the first time I submitted it, until I asked a representative if this was their policy. The representative assured me that it wasn’t. Strangely, I never got another rejection after I asked that question. I’m imagining the rep noted in my files: “the jig is up! Pay the claims for this one!”
But how would we pay for Medicare for All? Well, say you paid roughly $200 a week for insurance for yourself and your family. If you paid the same amount, or maybe even a few dollars more, but didn’t have to pay for co-pays, deductibles of thousands per year per family member, and it covered dental and eyecare (something we all sorely need as we age), I’m betting we would be ahead of the game.
And if you could keep your own doctor, because you didn’t have to change if your doctor wasn’t in the network of your latest insurance plan, you could rest a little easier.
Universal healthcare is only a foreign concept here because we act as if healthcare is a privilege and not a right. We hang onto the caste system that says our healthcare should remain a for-profit sick care business that is more beholden to its shareholders than its members.
So every year our current employers must scramble to find the lesser of several evils to offer its employees for healthcare. And should something catastrophic happen in our lives, or the lives of our loved ones, be it coronavirus or cancer, or anything horribly expensive in between, those unfortunate people may lose their homes, and everything to outrageous medical costs. This country is unique in the number of people forced to declare bankruptcy from medical bills.
With the new administration, there has at least been an reopening of the enrollment for Affordable Care Act (thanks Obama), with fingers crossed for a public option someday.
It’s not Medicare for All, which I’m hoping will someday be seriously regarded. I’m not against Gofundme campaigns. But we can do better with our tax dollars than acquiesce to the greed of a for-profit healthcare system, and then have to rely on the kindness of strangers.
Cheryl Charles can be reached at [email protected].
