Health Care for Everyone

Fran asked today, "if you could enact one bit of social reform, what would it be?"

For me, today, it's health care. Single payer, medicare for all or whatever you want to call it. I want full blown equal access for everyone to medical treatment and no overpaid manager who has no medical degree deciding who gets what treatment based on the shareholders report of dividends.

Yes, I come from Canada, so I know what guaranteed coverage means, and it is not the travesty that the health care industry here would have people believe. So much so that the big insurance companies currently have law suits going in several provinces to force them to offer to all Canadians the kind of "care" we have here. The Canadian system works, and big health care is trying to break it like ours. It isn't because they want to provide for the people who need treatment, since under the Canadian system everyone gets treated, it's so they can get a cut like they do here, so they can insert themselves between the person and the health care provider. Well over half of what we pay for health care goes to the insurance companies and their huge corporate machine, not to the medical providers.

Up until the current economic crisis, most personal bankruptcy in this country was because of medical costs, it may still be. None of my Canadian family and friends face losing their homes to cover medical costs. For that matter, none of them have to stay in a particular job to keep medical benefits, their single payer coverage is the ultimate in portable.

There are so many egregious examples of people who have their insurance denied or coverage dropped because of their illness going on too long or being too costly. Just Google insurance coverage denied or something like that and you'll get over 2 million hits.

I just know, as the parent of two young people who don't have coverage, and senior parents on a fixed income, life is very difficult out there for a lot of folks. Not getting prescriptions filled because of costs, not using the emergency room because the co-pay is too high, waiting to go to the Dr until after the last visit is paid off, even if really ill, etc. And, the one child just got a raise, (.08/hour) so is now no longer eligible for the assistance program he had used that allowed a graduated scale of payments.

I have excellent health insurance, and we have used it quite a bit over the years, since my husband has managed to experience a wide variety of medical conditions. It has been a blessing, and has necessitated my staying in a job that where for several years conditions were so miserable that if it weren't for the medical coverage I'd have been long gone. But, we had already discovered what happened without coverage.

Himself became ill when we were living in the mid-west, I had been paying premiums, but the coverage mysteriously disappeared when his pneumonia became something much more serious. He was in a "charity" ward in the hospital for 17 days, 3 beds in a 2 bed room, no visitors, and never received proper treatment. Rather than pursue what he really had, his Doctor put him on a drug for something he knew he didn't have as part of a trial. Needless to say himself got sicker and sicker and we finally gave up the "good" life of welfare care and moved home.
He was on Medicaid here when we first got back, but here he got the treatment he needed, including surgery to remove half of one lung and a huge growth (non-cancerous). It was many years before there was a definitive diagnosis of what he had, but he got life saving surgery under government health care in Washington. (Which also says to me that leaving health care management to individual states is folly, or everyone will move to the states with good coverage).

We had another opportunity to experience medical treatment without insurance when the second child was born. I was working s a consultant and had no benefits - the "If-you-don't-work-you-don't get-paid" style. We prepaid as much as we could, but it took almost a year to pay of everything and that was for a well child and a short hospital stay. (I knew I should have done it at home).

So, I pass on the request: if you could enact one bit of social reform, what would it be?