I've been meaning to write this diary for a while now. Well, not this specific diary, content-wise. But just a diary. I had my photo-blog entry way back in the depths of the 2008 campaign, just after the man who is now our President had effectively secured the Democratic nomination. I was planning to start making regular contributions around here, aside from the occasional comment, after lurking for however long it was I'd been around (late '04, I think?).
But like the best laid plans, it went awry. It was the summer after college and I was getting ready to move 600 miles away to start law school. Things got hectic. I kept thinking, "Maybe tomorrow I'll write that new diary." Tomorrow came and went. Soon, it just became easier to say, "Oh, it's been so long...why bother?" You know how it goes.
Life's taken quite a few twists and turns since then. And now I not only feel that I want to try and write again. I feel like I need to write again. So here goes nothing.
(First, please note that this won't be a fancy diary with pictures and all sorts of links. Just a story that involves a lot of the crap that's gone on lately that's impacted my family, and a lot of it is tied, directly or indirectly, to the economy and health care. I guess in way, this is my belated response to the passage of the health insurance reform bill.)
For a while, it looked like things were starting to look up for my family. Even though we live in Michigan, which as pretty much everyone knows was the economic ground zero of the recession long before said recession hit the whole country. I was off to law school. My younger brother had a well-paid job in a metal shop running a bunch of equipment that I wouldn't ever dream of going near (I'm kind of a klutz sometimes...I'd lose a limb, I'm sure of it). Even my mother was doing well.
A bit about Mom. A long, long time ago, all those 27-ish years ago before I was born, she worked for GM. She left when I was born to be a stay-at-home mom. Three years later, my brother came along. Things between her and my dad were never that great, but consistently got worse. The divorce was finalized in the early 90s and we were off on our own. We moved around a few times, mainly because of ongoing problems with my father, but once things mostly settled down, we were living with my grandma in the next town over from where we'd lived. Mom spent the last few years of grandma's life taking care of her, and as a result the trust my grandmother set up let us stay on for up to 15 years after she died in 2002.
The problem was, Mom had difficulty getting a job for all those years, between the moving and then taking care of grandma (the latter basically being a full time job, sans pay). She also had some medical problems, and of course, unless/until she had a job, no insurer would go near her. A couple years after grandma died, she finally managed to get a full-time job, which provided health insurance and started to get some things taken care of.
In 2008, she was injured off the job. They held her position for nearly a year, but ultimately, she had to give up hope of ever going back. About this time last year, she was finally eligible for both Medicare (yay socialized medicine!) and began receiving Social Security. She was planning to use that evil government health care to finally get her major health problems (especially a bad shoulder) taken care of.
Like I said, things were looking up.
Then, last summer, my brother lost his job. Strike one.
The problem with living in grandma's old house was that we live in a fairly affluent area. With only Social Security and a small pension from her time at GM, the property taxes started piling up. Mom was taking care of it though as best she could. The folks at the county treasurer's office were very understanding; after all, other people were having the same problems. I mean, when it's competitive to even get a part-time job at the gas station, what good does it do to hound people? Still, strike two.
It was a couple months ago when things fell apart. I'd just been back to school for about two weeks (it just before the first of the big blizzards) when I called Mom to see how things were. She'd been scheduled to have surgery (finally!) to take care of her shoulder...it was supposed to be a long recovery, but at the end she figured she'd finally be able to get at least a part-time job.
Except she hadn't had the surgery. It turns out that my uncle (her brother) and my aunt (her sister), who were also co-owners of the house along with Mom, had found out that the taxes weren't fully paid and they were "very upset" with the condition of the house, which hadn't been maintained to their satisfaction. My uncle had shown up a few days earlier, spent an entire afternoon berating my mother along with my aunt (via telephone), and then got her to sign a document saying she'd give up her right to remain in the house because of all the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad things she'd done.
Needless to say, my "future lawyer" warning bells went off. I told her not to sign anything further until she talked to a lawyer, and I promptly spent the rest of my day calling back to Michigan and found her one through some of my legal field friends. Unfortunately, the damage was done, it seems.
After a few days of going over everything, the lawyer reluctantly concluded that, given the terms of grandma's trust, they had a pretty decent case and it would end up costing more to fight it (and probably lose) than my mother could ever afford. The original deadline for us to get out was February 28; we managed to negotiate that back to March 15.
I went home for spring break and spent it helping Mom move into a new (and much smaller) apartment that she'd managed to find on short notice. As Mom said, "It's not the Taj Mahal [I'd home not, considering that's a mausoleum], but it's home." Strike three.
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While I know that's a lot of background to get to my ultimate point, I think it's necessary. It's necessary because, in my mind, it exemplifies why the health insurance reform that is now law was a necessary first step in a long-overdue change in our health care system. That and I've just needed to vent and tell this story for a while now.
I was uninsured for several years, until I got to school, where we are required (dare I say, mandated?) by the school (a public school, so I guess it's sort of the government saying it, isn't it?) to carry health insurance. Given what I went through, and even more so, what my mother went through, I really can't help but think just how different things would've turned out if we'd both had health insurance years ago. Maybe I could've avoided that cold that kept me out of work for most of a week. Maybe Mom could've had that shoulder surgery years ago, back when the injury first occurred. Maybe she'd have a job now and we wouldn't have gotten thrown out of our house unceremoniously by a couple of people who were more concerned with their own financial well-being than with what happened to their own sister.
(Yes, there are some family dynamics involved here. And yes, even I admit that, legally, they probably had a pretty good case. But the entire way they approached this, especially considering they knew all the problems that my mother was having, makes them no-good, self-centered pond scum as far as I'm concerned.)
Clearly, this isn't the traditional story of how the lousy economy or the lack of health insurance bankrupted a family. We didn't have a mortgage to lose, for instance. But I think it goes to show that even the most unusual of circumstances can put you in exactly the same position as everyone else who's lost a home or had health problems bring them to ruin in the "murder by spreadsheet" business that is--or, hopefully soon, was--health insurance.
I don't know where things will go from here, either on a personal level or in the wider world. I'm still waiting to see how things work out in the former: my brother got his job back a few days ago, but already suffered an injury that could prove devastating, and Mom is still, of course, struggling financially and having to deal with her money-grubbing siblings (who want to spruce up the house and expect to sell it, apparently for like $400,000...I don't see that happening unless a miracle hits the MI real estate market). As to the latter, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic. I think that the new reforms are going to do a lot of good, and will soon whet people's appetites for more of that "hopey changey" stuff that a certain half-term Alaska governor so derisively scoffs at.
Like I said further up, this is part opinion piece and part "I had to get this off my chest." So if you read it all the way through, thank you. Hopefully this time, it won't be two years before I write another one. And who knows, maybe the next one won't be so downbeat!
Thanks again for reading, and good night.