Over at FDL there's a thread full of stories about health insurance. What's interesting to me, as a sometime guest author at FDL, is how many of the regulars have stories. Worth your while to read, and here are some excerpts...

Seepesate...

Just to back Jane up, my mother’s experience is much the same. She has Hodgekin’s (cancer of the lymph glands). When initially diagnosed, she had excellent insurance coverage. She is also, being a bookkeeper by trade, meticulous about paying bills, maintaining credit rating, etc. In short, she as responsible, intelligent, and financially savvy as could be expected.

Then she got cancer. Over the course of her treatment, she was financially devasted. She couldn’t work and had to go through all the standard fun cancer treatments. In other words, she was completely shafted.

The treatments were successful, but then she had a whole new problem — finding a job. The cancer had kept her from working for a couple of years, and the company that she had worked for no longer had a position for her. Also, since she was “cured”, her insurance company opted not to renew her policy — her history of cancer rendered her essentially uninsurable.

There’s the rub. It took her another two years to find work (and she wasn’t slacking — we’re talking a serious, daily job hunt). The reason? She was uninsurable, and therefore could not be hired by most companies — they had deals with their insurance providers that required 100% enrollment of the workforce in the policy. If you can’t get on the policy, you can’t get hired.

That’s two years of crushing medical debt, no incoming, raising two children, and dealing with the inevitable ongoing health needs. She only avoided bankruptcy through what I consider to be superhuman effort.

Her experience made me loathe health insurance companies. The whole point of insurance, after all, is to shield you from the costs of disastrous events. In her case, the point was utterly lost. Once all was added together, she would have been better off if she had taken all those premiums and dumped the cash into T-bills instead of an insurance policy.

apishapa...

Several years ago, my son (16 at the time) got stepped on by a horse. I took him to thte doctor, got x-rays and was told his foot was bruised, no breaks. He tried to walk on it for about a year, but he walked with his leg twisted around and was in constant pain. Then he fell off the barn landed on the same foot. Took him in again, more x-rays. Bruised again. This time when he did not heal I called the Doctor and demanded a second opinion. The nurse told me “his foot is not broken”. I told her I wanted a second opinion from someone ELSE. And I did not care if his foot was broke or not. He was in pain and it was not healing. It took another two 0months to get a referral. When I got him to a new Doctor. We found out his foot had been broken BOTH times. He had walked on this broken foot so long it damaged his ligaments and he had suffered nerve damage to his feet. He was put in a cast for 12 weeks to try to straighten his leg so he did not walk with his foot twisted sideways. He wsa suuposed to get surgery, but that doctor knew that my insurance on my son was running out at the end of the year and refused to operate on him because my insurance would not cover the after care. Consequently my 18 year old son was told he would be in constant pain for the rest of his life and he might as well get used to it. A doctor told him this.

I did not have enough sense to file a malpractice suit against the first doctor and now it is too late. I have no use for doctors or for insurance companies after what was done to him.

jeffbinnc...

HI Jane,
I can sympathize. I’m looking at a foot-high stack of EOBs from my wife’s emergency brain surgery last fall and wondering where the people in this country who think our health care system works are coming from. We had “good” insurance supposedly designed for self-employed people but are contending with bills that exceed $40,000. The day after I received an EOB showing that our insurance company was paying only $15,000 on a $64,600 bill, I researched our company and found it was owned by The Blackstone Group, a hedge fund controlled by Stephen A. Schwarzman who is worth over $7 billion and who pays less % of taxes on the earnings from his hedge fund than I pay on my wages.

Elizabeth Schoettly...

I have a similar situation, only my out of pocket is supposed to be $3500 per year, insurance clocks in at $360/month, and for treatment due to a bad fracture in 2003, I now have $93,000 in ‘unreimbursed’, “This is coming out of your pocket, baby” medical expenses.

Not counting the pharmacy bills, or even considering my prescriptions jumped from $36.00 per month for the one prescription to $145.00 per month in the past 6 months. Oh, and my premiums doubled between 2002 and 2003, then doubled again.

Then again, four years of college level math probably means I just “don’t get it”

A Hermit...

My mother was diagnosed with colon cancer last year; they caught it very early, had her in surgery a week after diagnosis.

She was in hospital, in a private room, for another week, then sent home with daily visits from a nurse for the next six weeks until she was all healed up. They got everything and there’s no sign of a relapse.

I think her total out of pocket expenses were a couple of hundred dollars upfront for medication, mostly painkillers, 100% of which was reimbursed.

My parents’ insurance rates didn’t go up, they’ll have no problem getting treatment in the future, and they won’t have to mortgage the house to pay for Mom’s surgery (or Dad’s heart attack the year before.

Did I mention I live in Canada, where we have single payer, universal public health insurance? What the f*** is America waiting for?

There are many more, head on over, and weep, or tell yourself that the "free" market is the solution, whichever medicine you prefer.