I wrote to my senator. I wrote to the White House. Tomorrow I'll call all those numbers slinkerwink and nyceve have been posting, since I'll have all day to wait on the line.
I know that "Give me what I want or I'll take my ball and go home" isn't productive. And I'm sure that there will be people who are just plain tired of hearing folks talk about moving to Canada. This isn't just political talk for me. It's personal. My husband is Canadian. We're getting ready to buy a house within the next two years. We've been talking a lot about which side of the border that should be on.
There's lots of pros and cons to living in either country. Even on the pettiest level, America has better toothpaste while Canada has better fast food tea. It's a lot to consider, or it should be. Unfortunately, our discussion keeps coming back to what would happen if one of us gets sick or injured. Buying a house will take pretty much all of our savings. We recognize that we're damn lucky to have savings to talk about. It will put us in a very vulnerable position, just one drunk driver or pre-cancerous cell away from financial ruin. That's despite having insurance. Are we willing to risk that on a daily basis?
So this is the letter I wrote to my senator:
I'm writing to tell you I support the single payer. I've been told it's off the table. I've been told I'll be lucky to see a public option. It makes me sad because I really like my country, but I can't afford it any more. I'm going to have to switch governments. Maybe it sounds like hyperbole. The fact is that I'm married to a Canadian citzen. I, unlike so many people, have the option of better health care for reasonable prices. All I have to do is leave the land I was born in and give up on the country I love.
Don't think this is an option that I'm considering lightly. I persuaded my husband that we should be married here and apply for permanent residency for him. We've invested thousands of dollars and three years in that process. Our jobs are here. My family is here. We love living in Seattle. We want to buy a house here. In two years we'll be ready to take that step. It's a big commitment. Most people look at the neighborhood they may move into. Some even consider what state would be best for them to settle down in. We suddenly realized that we needed to compare countries as well.
In most ways, Canada and the US are pretty comparable. They're both first world nations. They both honor the rule of law. They're both founded in representative government. But in America, even with insurance, a medical catastrophe often results in bankruptcy. For us, that's not an acceptable risk. I can live on a sand bar in North Carolina and the government will sell me flood insurance. Yet living on a sand bar or in a flood plain is avoidable. I cannot avoid having a heart or being made out of cells that may sicken, die, or malfunction. Keep in mind, I have insurance through Aetna. I've been told it's quite good. I and my husband are also reasonable healthy. This hasn't kept us from having problems with our coverage.
We chose a plan with a $500 per person deductible. This means that for the most part, we pay the insurance company monthly premiums in order for them to tell us that we owe our doctor the full amount. The doctor bills them, and because we rarely need the services of a doctor, they bill us. Last year I became ill on a weekend. Rather than go to the emergency room for a minor bacterial infection, I went to a clinic that has weekend hours. They billed my insurance company, after warning me that some plans didn't cover out of network visits. I assured them that I had chosen a plan that covered 70% of out of network costs on purpose. I had read the fine print. My visit for basic services was covered. That's why Aetna didn't get the bill. They didn't receive it the first time it was sent. Or the second. The third time their fax number was wrong. Fourth time, the fax must have gone to the wrong person. Fifth time, the email of the electronic record went to someone who had just gone on vacation. Nearly a year later, and after calling and emailing back and forth daily with an Aetna rep named Bill for nearly a week, they recognized that they had received a bill from that clinic. Out of some three hundred dollars in charges, they were liable for around $25. The rest was my responsibility as part of my deductible.
If I hadn't had the time and intestinal fortitude to write, phone, email, and fax Aetna on and off for all that time, I would have been liable for that bill. You can add that cost to the $400 a month that's deducted from our paychecks. Most people don't have the time to deal with that. I can only imagine what it must be like to have much higher bills, a chronic illness, be trying to hold down a job, and go through the same thing. It's not something I'd choose for myself. Given that, buying a house in America, paying property taxes, supporting Democratic candidates, and voting here in Seattle, WA are luxuries I can't afford. I'd like to. I really would. But without at least a public option it would be playing russian roulette with my life and finances.
I don't want to pack up my ball and go. I want to stay here for so many reasons I can't list them all. I'm just not willing to die for it. Maybe that makes me un-American after all.