My healthcare nightmare started several years ago and now it has finally come to a point that I simply do not know what to do.
Follow me below the fold to hear how this system of healthcare is sending my family into a tailspin.
[Update] Thanks to all for all of the kind words and suggestions. Please feel free to use my diary as a way to illustrate just how screwed up our health care system really is. Also, I would like to send along my best wishes to those who have their own health crises. We are all in this together.
I spent most of my life in the financial services industry. In the late 90’s I branched out on my own, opened my own firm and was living the American dream. When I had my own firm I provided insurance for my employees and myself and it was great insurance...expensive but great. As a matter of fact my small firm spent about 10k per month to make sure that my 11 employees had insurance. Along came the dot com crash, coupled with 9/11 and some stupid mistakes on my part and the next thing you know I have essentially lost everything except my house.
No big deal. I started starting over, only this time it is not so easy. I take a couple of different positions along the way so that I would have insurance but things just kept going from bad to worse. The big money that I was used to making was no longer there. The gold plated insurance was a distant memory. And all the while I was worrying about being sucked into the system.
I was able to get insurance through a company that I was working with and had not had it very long when my middle son was diagnosed with AIED or autoimmune ear disease. This is an incredibly rare ear disease that we luckily were able to get diagnosed properly. The treatments for the disease are steroid treatments, and if those don’t work then chemotherapy at approximately 7000 per treatment is the protocol for treatment. Oh the insurance company only pays for a small portion by the way. My son responded well to the steroid treatment and we did not have to go the chemo route. His hearing came back and they told us that it would fluctuate until he was about 21 and then it should stick. Well things have been going along ok for the past 4 years. I managed to hang onto some form of insurance until about two years ago. I could no longer afford to keep myself on the policy so I had my wife and kids on a policy from Aetna. From the time that we got that policy the premiums that we paid have gone up nearly 50%.
Now here is where the nightmare starts. About 2 years ago my youngest boy was running around barefooted in a creek, stepped on a stick and long story short got a massive infection in his foot that landed us in the hospital for a week with emergency surgery, 3 micro biologists, and hard core chemo to fight the infection. Our crap insurance from Aetna left us with huge bills. Then just a few months later my wife had to have surgery...surgery that we had put off forever because of lack of funds. We went ahead and did it before the end of the year because we wanted to take advantage of the fact that we shouldn’t have to pay any more out of pocket costs because we were under the impression that we had maxed out our out of pocket provision. Wrong. So after that surgery we had another huge bill. Fast forward a couple of months and my wife has to have an emergency appendectomy. New year, new deductibles. More bills. Fast forward another month and I lose my job. I get reemployed quickly but for even less money with a nasty commute (read more expenses).
So let’s recap. I have a huge pile of medical bills, insurance that has skyrocketed 50% and less money to cover it all. Something has to give. And that something is the insurance.
Now today my son who is a sophomore in High School says that over the past 2 weeks his hearing has been wildly fluctuating. He HAS to get to a doctor as soon as possible to start his treatments again, but we have no insurance. Furthermore if we go to a doctor right now we would not be able to afford it and he would be branded with a pre existing condition for which we will never get his treatment covered.
I have spent a lifetime of handling pressure but this time I am really freaking out. This is my boy we are talking about. This healthcare system is a crock of shit. No one should have to go through this.