Chances Are This Is The Reason Someone You Know Avoids Needed Care

[Playinghardball]

No one should fear this.



Found on Physicians For A National Health Program’s Facebook page/MoveOn.org

[Royal Sloan 09]

1. K-n-R, True Dat

yep, seems to be we're #1,
oh wait that's the wrong way, but it seems to be the new American way, hurrah

[progressoid]

2. I am that 33%

[Initech]

3. Best health care system in the world.*

* - if you can afford the outrageous costs so the people that poorly run our health care companies can afford their sixth house and private jet.

[Auntie Bush]

4. Many people can't even afford the 20% Copay.

[yardwork]

5. It's shocking how quickly the bills mount for just diagnostic tests.

I had a breast cancer scare last year. Fortunately it turned out negative, but I ended up paying several thousand dollars just in co-pays for standard diagnostics - biopsy, ultrasound, etc. Fortunately I could manage it but what about people who can't? It goes on credit card debt. Two thousand dollars in unexpected costs in one month is a big surprise. Thank goodness I turned out not to be sick - what then???!

[hunter]

7. Putting it on our credit card destroyed our credit.

I think when the credit card companies see late payments and medical charges they get aggressive, trying to get a chunk of meat out of you before you go down.

First they upped the interest rate to 30% and then they canceled the card.

Knowing what I know now, I'd never bring a credit card to a hospital, lab or clinic... It's better to deal directly with the medical provider. Even if it goes to collections you can still deal directly with the provider.

The credit card companies are nasty. Nobody should have to deal with that crap when they are sick.

[yardwork]

8. I know. It's terrible. Nobody else in the developed world has to go through this.

I don't understand why Americans put up with this. When I saw people holding signs for "no public option" at rallies against Obamacare I couldn't imagine what they were thinking.

[Egalitarian Thug]

6. A million bankruptcies a year from medical costs, we are just one.

I thought I was retired in 2003. I had made a very good living for a couple of decades, almost any reasonable person would count me among the rich, and had socked away enough money to meet my rather modest needs for the rest of my life even if were to live to 100, or so I thought.

Even with the so-called great insurance I had, one major illness wiped me out. We lost our home, cars, savings, our future. On top of all this, I was one of the lucky ones. I had the means to find and get the good treatment that is available to those that can. Almost a decade earlier my mother was not one of those and she paid for her lack of wealth with her life.

She had insurance as well. She had the kind of insurance almost all of you that are lucky enough to have any, have. We didn't know that she had fallen into a system that is concerned with nothing except draining as much money as possible from sick people as they can before their victims die. We were all told, and we believed, that she was getting the care she needed. It wasn't until after her death that we learned the truth, the truth that she was dumped into the system that exists for the little people, that had we known and paid enough, she would probably be alive today.

So I am alive today. I am in my 50s, unhirable, over educated and overqualified, destined to live out whatever time remains doing the same menial jobs I did 30 years ago for less money than I made then. I have no insurance. I haven't had a checkup for six years, I haven't seen a dentist for nine. I very likely am sick again and for sure need to have my teeth looked after but we just can't afford it.

This is the great system that our President and our party has dumped all the rest of us into for the foreseeable future. This is the system that none of them will ever be victimized by. They will all get the very best treatment possible, the treatment that all of us are entitled to, for the rest of their lives. We get to pay for their futures with our lives.

[yardwork]

9. I am so sorry.