Insurance
Hi all, if anyone's left reading this after so long. Sorry for not posting. I just haven't had the angst and energy required to rant properly for a while, not to mention all the billion and one other things in real life that I had to take care of. Anyway, here we go again.
Tonight I saw a piece on ABC News that made my blood boil. I guess I've always known that health insurance has been a problem, and I've always wanted to do something about it. Well, lately that knowledge has hit a little closer to home because my family has lost our insurance since my dad lost his job. That means my mom's been stressing even more than usual. What if I got hurt at school? What if I caught the flu? How will we pay for the shots and checkups I need as a growing teenager? So she signed me up for the state's childrens' insurance plan, HUSKY. The confirmation came through two days ago, so now I'm covered and we don't have to resort to buying medicine from Canada, which is for some reason illegal.
The article on ABC is part of a new series on the health care problem in the states. Tonight was a "quick survey" of a few of the nine million uninsured children and their families living between the "Medicaid" and "Private Insurance" levels of income. Wait, what? NINE MILLION?? Yes. And that is just the number of children. Their parents don't have insurance either unless their jobs cover it, but come on, who gets health coverage from their employers these days? The stories the reporter told were awful. The girl with a bone disease who has no doctor. The boy whose mother couldn't get antibiotics for his toe infection because no doctor would see him to prescribe any. The boy who DIED because no dentist would care for his abcessed tooth, which became a brain infection.
After the report I realized that all of these families were African American. My mom mentioned this, too. She said, "I think we got you covered because we're white and well-educated. I knew how to fill the forms out. I did everything they asked, everything they probably think they aksed, and extra. When I went to turn it all in the people at the desk asked what I was doing there."
The whole thing (pardon the expression) makes me sick. Private insurance is rediculously expensive for any sort of decent coverage. Medicaid only applies to the very poor. There's a gap between the two and far too many fall through the cracks. Keeping Medicaid for the poor supposed to save tax money, or so I'm told. But that boy with the toe infection? By the time his mother got Medicaid (which took five months of desperate phone calls), he required an operation costing a quarter of a million dollars. That was covered by tax money. Don't you think it would be a lot cheaper to get the kid an antibiotic?
Then there are the underlying social issues. Blacks just don't get what they ought to when it comes to social services. Employers are less likely to hire, because few get enough education, because state-sponsored schools are terrible, because of the siphoning of funds from social programs. Then there's just plain prejudice. So many factors combine against people who are poor and black that few ever get any chance to not be poor anymore. The whole scenario is disgusting. It's not just the health care program that needs to be fixed, it's the whole damn social system.
Tonight I saw a piece on ABC News that made my blood boil. I guess I've always known that health insurance has been a problem, and I've always wanted to do something about it. Well, lately that knowledge has hit a little closer to home because my family has lost our insurance since my dad lost his job. That means my mom's been stressing even more than usual. What if I got hurt at school? What if I caught the flu? How will we pay for the shots and checkups I need as a growing teenager? So she signed me up for the state's childrens' insurance plan, HUSKY. The confirmation came through two days ago, so now I'm covered and we don't have to resort to buying medicine from Canada, which is for some reason illegal.
The article on ABC is part of a new series on the health care problem in the states. Tonight was a "quick survey" of a few of the nine million uninsured children and their families living between the "Medicaid" and "Private Insurance" levels of income. Wait, what? NINE MILLION?? Yes. And that is just the number of children. Their parents don't have insurance either unless their jobs cover it, but come on, who gets health coverage from their employers these days? The stories the reporter told were awful. The girl with a bone disease who has no doctor. The boy whose mother couldn't get antibiotics for his toe infection because no doctor would see him to prescribe any. The boy who DIED because no dentist would care for his abcessed tooth, which became a brain infection.
After the report I realized that all of these families were African American. My mom mentioned this, too. She said, "I think we got you covered because we're white and well-educated. I knew how to fill the forms out. I did everything they asked, everything they probably think they aksed, and extra. When I went to turn it all in the people at the desk asked what I was doing there."
The whole thing (pardon the expression) makes me sick. Private insurance is rediculously expensive for any sort of decent coverage. Medicaid only applies to the very poor. There's a gap between the two and far too many fall through the cracks. Keeping Medicaid for the poor supposed to save tax money, or so I'm told. But that boy with the toe infection? By the time his mother got Medicaid (which took five months of desperate phone calls), he required an operation costing a quarter of a million dollars. That was covered by tax money. Don't you think it would be a lot cheaper to get the kid an antibiotic?
Then there are the underlying social issues. Blacks just don't get what they ought to when it comes to social services. Employers are less likely to hire, because few get enough education, because state-sponsored schools are terrible, because of the siphoning of funds from social programs. Then there's just plain prejudice. So many factors combine against people who are poor and black that few ever get any chance to not be poor anymore. The whole scenario is disgusting. It's not just the health care program that needs to be fixed, it's the whole damn social system.
posted by Mint Sharpie at 6:03 PM
1 comments
