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Click here to share your health care story.
She was another statistic, but she was also our "Bee" "Elizabeth had energy, enthusiasm, a sense of adventure, an openness to life and all its experiences… She loved to read, to write poetry. She loved art and drawing. She wanted to travel the world and meet all the interesting people in it. Liz had a heart of gold. She was intensely empathetic. She took on the hurt of others deeply. She seemed to feel it was her job to make everyone feel better and feel welcome.”
These were some of the words spoken by her mother at the memorial service for my niece, Elizabeth, who died on August 14, 2008 in a Connecticut hospital ICU at the age of 30. Elizabeth, or "Bee” as my brother and her family affectionately called her, died of complications from pneumonia that I believe could have been prevented if she had access to health insurance before she ended up in the emergency room.
Elizabeth lost her health insurance when she lost her job in the spring of 2008. She was embarrassed to tell her family of this loss and to ask for our help. The day she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, she was researching jobs at her library in Connecticut trying desperately to find another position that offered health care but the growing recession was making that very difficult. When she lost her job she couldn't afford COBRA since that was a year before the stimulus package subsidized this program to help the unemployed. She hadn't been feeling well for weeks but didn't want to worry her parents so the regular calls were always positive sounding.
According to new research done by Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, almost 45,000 people die each year for no other reason than because they didn't have health insurance. That is five people every hour. These are shocking numbers. Shocking to know that so many deaths could have been prevented. Each one of the 45,000 has names like Elizabeth with families and friends who mourn deeply their loss.
If HR 3200 had been passed 10 years ago, Elizabeth and many others would have had a public option among the private insurance companies in a "Health Care Exchange” with objective comparisons of plans and costs. They would have had full coverage for preventive health care. Coverage would be based on ability to pay and would only have cost them 10% of their income each year for out of pocket health care expenses. If we had HR 3200, there would be no pre-existing condition exclusions, annual lifetime maximums, or have insurance dropped unexpectedly when illness occurs. Health care plans wouldn't discriminate based on health status or gender. This could have been the world Elizabeth lived in.
In 2007, I help found Bucks Voices for Health Care Reform to study and inform people in our county about the nation's health care crisis. Little did I think this crisis would have such a profound, personal effect on my family a year later.
Bucks Voices vision states: Health care should be considered integral with the common good that promotes human dignity for all. Both individuals and society have responsibilities for health care: we as individuals need to protect our health and we as a society need to provide a sustainable health care system.
I rededicated myself to working for this health care vision so that other families don't experience the preventable loss of loved ones due to the lack of health insurance.
This is an issue about fairness, the common good, and human dignity that deserves thoughtful study and deliberative discussion. In a country as great and compassionate as ours, it's wrong to have a health care system that allows access only if you have the money to pay for insurance to see a doctor. It is like saying you can have police and fire protection if you have the money to afford security. We don't call police and fire departments socialized security. And what would our communities be without both?
We know what our society is like without health insurance for all. Too many young, beautiful Elizabeths die.
Remember this story when you hear someone say that we are moving too fast in this latest legislative process. Delay has consequences.
This is our moment in history when change can happen if we who believe in justice, compassion, and fairness have the will to make it happen. Each of you as a citizen in this country has a critical role and important voice in this legislative process. No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.
Congressman Murphy, thousands of people in this county are depending on you to hear us and be our voice in Congress to make this 60-year dream of health care reform a reality this year.
This is my story.
Tam St. Claire
Sandy
For the first time in my life, I'm without health insurance. My COBRA insurance ran out last month. I'm uninsurable in the retail insurance market, because the for-profit insurance companies are allowed to exclude those of us who most need coverage. They can refuse coverage to someone for as simple a thing as having seen a doctor for a screening test for a serious illness, even if the test was negative.
I can't afford to buy into the prohibitively expensive "High Risk" pool insurance provided by the state. The deductibles are as high as $5000/yr BEFORE the insurance pays for anything, and the premiums are very expensive. Additionally, even though I was approved for Social Security Disability, you are required to wait 2 yrs and 5 months for Medicare eligibility after the date of your disability. I have another year to wait for Medicare.
If any readers watched "Sick in America" on PBS, or "60 Minutes" on CBS last week, you saw previously unimaginable stories of fellow citizens being turned away from cancer treatment with no other options available to them. They may have no health insurance, or be unable to afford treatments or medications with high co-pays, or that are denied by their insurers. Many in this country go into bankruptcy because of medical bills. This doesn't happen in other countries. Why is it allowed here?
Many hospitals have lost funding, the economy has caused huge job loss, and with it, huge numbers of people are now without health insurance. When hospitals can no longer afford to provide charity care, people die unnecessarily. People with families.
For years, we've been sold a bill of goods about the evils of "socialized medicine", and have allowed millions of our fellow countrymen and women AND children to go without a basic human right….health care. It says a lot about our country, and none of it complimentary, that we've allowed this situation to persist for decades. Many have a judgmental attitude about people who are seen as not doing enough to take care of themselves. We see them as other than we are somehow, as not being deserving of care if they can't pay for it. We ALL pay for that attitude in higher insurance premiums, medical charges, and poorer productivity of our work force.
Imagine if every citizen in this country, as in EVERY OTHER industrial nation had good health care as a right. If all children had preventive care, health screening, early intervention for health problems, how much better in school would children then do? If they HAD the glasses that they needed, regardless of their parents' financial status, if developmental delays were caught early and successfully treated, how much more of their potential would our country's children attain?
If parents didn't have to forgo their own routine physicals and health maintenance care, how much better parents could they be? As it is now, adults all over the country, even those WITH health insurance are delaying or not having routine screening tests that have been shown to catch health problems much earlier, and at a stage when treatment is cheaper and more effective, and time lost from work is much less. The insured are often unable to afford the escalating costs of co-pays, deductibles, and are anxious about taking time off of work for medical procedures. The end result will be people going undiagnosed and untreated for far longer.
In our political war of words about this issue, we've neglected to notice that millions in our country already have "socialized medicine"….the military, those on Medicare and Medicaid are all on socialized medicine plans. Why can't the rest of us be? Why, unlike all other industrialized countries do we allow a "for-profit" health insurance system? The "Blues", Blue Cross/Shield are now mostly for profit, and at first, none of them were. We pay huge percentages of our health dollars for them, their profits, their executives' huge salaries.
The current system is no longer working for us, and is no longer supportable. President Obama promised to give us all a choice of private or public health insurance plans like Medicare with lower premiums and better benefits. We would all save up to 30% on our premiums by being able to drive down prices across the board, according to the Commonwealth Fund report.
The insurance companies and their lobbyists are hard at work to prevent the public health insurance plan that we can no longer do without. Lower costs for us means less profits for them. They can't be allowed to block affordable health care for ALL Americans. Let your representatives know that you insist that Americans all have care, and that NONE of us will be all right until ALL of us are.
The world is watching us. Are we going to finally provide what most other nations provide as a basic right, or are we going to show the world that America doesn't really stand for rights for all it's citizens, but just for those who can afford them? The time to watch the news programs and think "That's just terrible." and leave it at that are over. We have to make ourselves heard NOW, and let our representatives know in no uncertain terms that America is a country that takes care of it's own. Start calling them everyone.
Nancy Clark
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