Every time I turn around the greedheads have thought of something else to threaten my life with.
I am so tired of fighting just to live...not just the disease (systemic lupus), which would be enough of a battle royal for anyone who lusts for combat (and I don't)...but the financial mess having a chronic illness as an American citizen has placed me in.
I wanted to do something with my life other than fight just to live. I am sick of being Sisyphus. But some clever bastard with a major stockholder's **** in his mouth is always coming up with something to make things harder for people who are unfortunate enough to get sick in the richest country in the world.
Tier IV is just the latest example of serious market failure in U.S. health insurance. Market failure means the glorious Free Market, if you are one of those who worship it, isn't even working in this case, so take your worship elsewhere--this mother of a market has to be FIXED.
The concept of insurance is shared risk. The idea is small, manageable premiums paid by a lot of people to be used to protect against any of them experiencing a catastrophe--in the case of health insurance, getting sick and needing expensive medical care. Insurance was NOT formed solely to provide a means of collecting funds that could be invested and reinvested and sent who knows where to provide large stockholder dividends and lots of executive high salaries and benefits. The insurance company isn't just there to collect premiums and distribute them; it is supposed to pay for health care in case of illness, and that is just what the companies work so hard in order to avoid doing.
They've come up with a lot of schemes. They cherry-pick their members and screen out the people who just might need health care as much as they can, all the while claiming that the way they dominate the way health care is accessed in the US is the only workable model for our economy. This leaves people who got sick at the wrong time in their economic life in the mess I am in. They don't give a fuck, but we entrust our collective health to them anyway.
They have taken us down the path of managed care, which has given bad primary care docs a lot of power they shouldn't have, drowned good primary care docs in paperwork, sometimes rewarded them for restricting care and punishing them for permitting care, and resulted in people sometimes not getting the procedures, medications, and/or specialist care they need in a timely manner--saving the company $$$ with the delay in or denial of such care.
Since we seem to have taken all this up the butt without much of a whimper, now they are brazen enough to try out "Tier IV". Tier IV effectively breaks the contract that insurance companies supposedly have with their members. If you get sick and you need a drug they consider to be too expensive to pay for, the drug is listed as Tier IV and YOU get to contribute to a lot of the drug's cost. Never mind if the cost means you choose between paying for the medicine and paying your rent. Never mind if, like in my case, the copays will exceed your income. They do not care.
Yes, some medications are extremely expensive, and I think we have the right to question why that is so when in many cases taxpayer money has gone into the development of the medications, in many cases the medications are sold at cheaper prices in other countries, in many cases the pharmaceutical companies screaming about their R & D costs are effectively diverting the media eye away from their marketing costs, their operating costs, their executive salaries and benefits and perks, etc. I remember going to one of their meetings and asking the immediately unpopular question of why were we eating caviar and drinking champagne at an expensive resort to discuss the problem of people who can't afford their health care because the cost of the medications, funding the caviar and the champagne, is too fucking high.
The insurance companies could put collective pressure on Big Pharm to bring the costs down for their members, but I guess Tier IV means everybody wins. Except the person who gets sick and needs one of those meds.
I wonder how far they are going to go before people figure out they may as well get a bunch of friends together and pay premiums into a group investment and use that for health care instead of trusting robber barons with their lives.
I've been screaming about this mess for years but it's like screaming in outer space. I don't think people are deaf; I think they've been sold a bill of goods that says our health care system can't be changed because what we have now is the best we can have and any change is just too scary. That's a very convenient thing for the people raking in the money to have us believe. And with all their money, they can put a lock on the media and on the politicians who are supposed to represent us.
Also. We're divided, so we're conquered. Dems vs. Repubs. Hillarites vs. Obamaites. North vs. South. West coast vs. East coast. "Salt of the earth" vs. "The Elite" (so anyone educated enough to be able to figure out the scam is suspect? Nice one). Black vs. brown vs. red vs. yellow vs. white. Catholic vs. Protestant. Christian vs. Muslim. Religious vs. nonreligious. Just keep squabbling and don't look at the man behind the curtain who is screwing you over so bad that you would pass out if you knew.
I wish I could get well and stay well for even as little as an unbroken six months, because I would so fight this one. Instead I have to hope someone else does. And most people don't have time to tuck their kids into bed properly, never mind study the performance of the health care market. Half the population is marching in lockstep to whatever the Republican party tells them to do on Fox News, and the other half can't unite to save their lives. This works out great for the greedheads. The money train can proceed unbroken. Bush and Cheney supposedly have their estates ready in one of the countries that doesn't extradite American criminals back to the US; wonder if insurance and drug co execs are their neighbors there.
We have fallen in among thieves. Wake up. Please, please, wake up.
Tags: health care insurance medication pharmaceuticals greed
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