Friends of ours from out of town stopped by to visit me and the husband yesterday. I love these friends; they're good people and fun to be with. Let's call them Jane and John, as I don't want to give their names out in this forum.
We got into a political discussion (because the current state of our state - California - is just ridiculous) and John stated that he's a libertarian and, as such, he's opposed to lots of spending by the government. He pointed out a couple of examples of government waste that I agreed with (why does a state government need to own a golf course?), but then I was able to present my side of things about government-run and taxpayer-supported single-payer health care. Come with me over the jump for a few points I made to him through the avenue of a personal story, and the productive result.
First, my husband and I talked to John about the fact that Medicare is actually the most efficient medical care system in the world; it covers and helps more people for less money than any other system out there, including the Canadian or British systems (which are usually thought of as ideal). This surprised John, who had always been told that single-payer insurance is notoriously inefficient.
Then I told him the story of my late roommate, who died as a direct result of the fact that we don't have single-payer here in America. The story is an upsetting one; John was stunned by it. I share it here because, to me, it stands as the primary example of why for-profit health care is an abomination and must be eradicated, and why single-payer is a necessity and must be enacted immediately.
Early in our relationship, my husband and I had a roommate who was injured on the job. She fell through a stadium bleacher as she was on her way to help an injured spectator (she was a nurse), was caught by her arm, hung from it, and ripped out her rotator cuff completely. At the time of the accident, she was only 52.
She was covered by her employer's health plan and also, of course, by Workman's Comp, since her injury happened while she was on the job. You'd think this would be a good situation, right? More insurance coverage is better because if company A can't cover you, company B will, right?
Wrong.
Instead of getting her into surgery to repair the rotator cuff, the two insurers started a battle over who was responsible for her care. Neither one wanted to pay for it, because it would cut into their profits. So while she waited for them to come to some kind of an agreement, she had to stay at home, on full workman's comp disability, and her doctors prescribed megadoses of painkillers - specifically, ibuprofen - for her to use to deal with the pain. And, of course, she was in excruciating pain, so she took them.
Do you know what happens to a person when they take 1600 mg of ibuprofen every four hours for two and a half years? The same thing that happens to an alcoholic after twenty or thirty years of drinking: they develop cirrhosis of the liver. And my roommate did.
If you've never seen anyone with terminal cirrhosis, I envy you. My roommate developed cirrhosis, and then when her liver failed, she developed ascites (pronounced ass-SITE-ees). Ascites is a condition where the toxins that the body should filter out with the liver are no longer filtered out. The abdominal cavity begins to fill up with these fluids, and swells up like a pregnant woman's belly. My roommate, a year before the liver failure finally killed her, was having between nine and twelve liters of fluid drained from her abdomen once every three days, through her navel. One time, the valve they'd surgically installed in her navel failed, and she sprayed the fluid all over the stairway carpeting as they were getting her down to the ambulance early one morning; her partner, our other roommate, called us from the emergency room to warn us not to walk on the stairway barefoot until it could be cleaned.
She was in constant pain. Near the end of her life, the painkillers stopped working and she had to take quinine pills to deal with the excruciating muscular cramps that result when your body's filtration system goes offline. There was one time when we didn't know that her partner had gone out of the house, and we only heard her calling for help when there was a short break between songs on our stereo. When we ran into her room, she was curled up in a fetal position on her bed, half-naked, begging for someone to get her partner. When we managed to find out what she needed, getting her the pills and then helping her take them was a job that required two people to do.
We moved out about six months before she died. We had to, because they were looking for a smaller place to move to that they could afford, and we were not going to be helpful in finding one. You see, when my roommate developed ascites, the workman's comp insurance company (the one that was paying her full disability income) declared her "permanent and stationary," took her off the liver transplant list, and essentially cut her off. Why should they try to save a 54-year-old woman with cirrhosis? It wasn't cost-effective.
She died because the insurers decided she wasn't worth saving. She was a funny, gentle, earthy woman who never said a bad word about anyone. And she died. Horribly. Painfully. Over three years.
Because of a torn rotator cuff injury that she sustained on the job.
If we had had single-payer, she would still be with us today and working as a nurse somewhere, because if we'd had single-payer, no insurance company would have been fighting with any other insurance company about whose responsibility her torn rotator cuff was. It would have been addressed - maybe not immediately, but certainly within a reasonable time span - and she would have been off disability and back to work.
When I finished this story, John was very quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I had no idea. I didn't have any information about the consequences of private insurance. I knew that private insurance wasn't great, but I didn't know about this. Thank you for this information."
I'm pretty sure we changed his mind. Information will do that.
I share this story with you all today because perhaps it will help convince someone else. Single-payer health insurance is not a luxury. It's an outright necessity.