I've had a bunch of emails asking where are the healthcare catastrophe diaries?
I've been spending some time on the unhealthy side of life. A touch of viral meningitis. I'm better but not perfect. There's nothing to treat viral meningitis, trust me, I went to two doctors.
I'm lucky, I have insurance, though one of my doctors doesn't take my crap junk insurance, I don't blame him. Why should a doctor accept a shit 20 cents on the dollar payment from a blood sucker insurance company? So I pay him. But when you shell out a couple of hundred dollars to a doctor, you understand what it feels like to be uninsured. You also ask yourself, what in the hell is wrong with a country that regards basic healthcare as a luxury?
Allow me to give you some bad news. We're all going to be paying a lot more for a lot less, and the insurance industry doesn't give a rat's ass how many Americans just throw in the towel and are forced to go naked.
That's right. This gem is from the American medical Association News.
Health plans say they'll risk losing members to protect profit margins: Meanwhile, businesses and individuals are dropping coverage in the wake of higher insurance premiums.
The nation's largest publicly traded health plans say they don't plan to temper premium increases for the sake of keeping members on their rolls -- particularly not while they are under pressure from Wall Street over what it sees as their disappointing earnings.
Wall Street analysts were shaken over the long-term prospects of the health plan business after bellwethers WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, the nation's two largest private-pay plans, reported less-than-expected profits from the first three months of this year.
While no plan said its overall membership has gone down, most say their risk-based commercial numbers -- representing traditional employer health benefits -- are declining or are not growing as quickly as anticipated. But health insurers say cutting premiums or reducing the rate of increase to keep customers would affect their bottom lines more than losing some members over premium hikes.
"We will not sacrifice profitability for membership," WellPoint President and CEO Angela Braly told analysts during a conference call.
http://www.ama-assn.org/...
As luck would have it and as I was attempting to get healthy, I got a phone call from my naked friend. She too, was under the weather. I could barely listen as she described what a sick and uninsured American does. You know the old saying, "there but for the grace of God go I".
She is far, far from alone. There must be hundreds of thousands without access to basic healthcare in New York, the biggest city in the richest country on the planet.
This is the friend I wrote about some time ago. She could no longer pay the skyrocketing insurance premiums and decided to go naked. Before she gave up the unaffordable insurance, she thought she was solidly middle class. But thinking you're solidly middle class is meaningless these days of declining real wages and sharply escalating energy, health and food costs.
Okay, you ready for this? Here's how a once solidly middle class Americans copes. She went to the local Duane Reade walk-in health clinic. For those of you who don't live around here, Duane Reade is the drugstore chain which recently opened little medical offices in some of their stores. The doctor she saw suggested a blood test. My naked friend is no idiot. She's going to wait and hope she recovers because she knows that the lab costs will be simply unaffordable.
She right to be scared. I just received an Explanation of Benefits from my junk insurance company. A lab test which was billed at $132.00, the insurer paid $28.00. And that's only for one test! As a person without insurance, she'd be liable for the full $132.00, and as I said, that was for one lab test, I had about six or eight.
Nothing we are being told by the Democratic candidates about healthcare reform makes much sense. Read this if you doubt me.
But don't take my word for anything. When you have a few moments, you might want to spend some time reading this dismal report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This is why on June 19th in San Francisco, we're going to make our voices heard against AHIP, the merchants of misery.