From Change.org:
I am turning thirty in a few days, but I have had cancer for ten years. I went for my regular test at Sloan-Kettering a month ago, and I thought to myself over and over before submitting to the general anesthesia, "All I want for my thirtieth birthday is a clean scan. Good news, good news, good new--" and that's where I stop remembering. When I came to, four hours later, some part of my brain was still repeating "Good news good news good news." But I was wrong. I don't exactly know why I can live and thrive with cancer, but am reduced to such unadulterated fear when it comes to maintaining my insurance coverage. Having cancer? I've been brave and strong and fierce. Losing the only way to maintain my fleeting health? I can't face it. I'm reading this blog, reading about people who have died because they do not have insurance, who have died trying. Will I be one of them?
A friend told me yesterday about a late friend of hers. Diagnosed with breast cancer she had been scheduled for a double mastectomy. Faced with the horrifying prospect of a $30,000 payout, the insurance company pored over her records to see if she was truly deserving.
They decided that she had, improperly, failed to inform them of her high blood pressure years before when she signed up for the policy. They cleverly dodged the bullet by refusing payment just in the nick of time, I suppose by canceling her policy. Although the woman’s doctor affirmed that she had been completely truthful in her application, the courageous insurance company hung tough. Deprived of life saving surgery, the woman’s cancer spread and she died. There must have been a few knowing high fives at the water cooler that day, and some nice bonuses at the end of the year. Read it all at Daily Kos
So, there are billion-dollar investments being made to build prostate cancer proton treatment centers that may or may not be any more successful than older radiation therapies that doctors have been using for years. Or, more successful than doing nothing at all, for that matter.
Meanwhile, just as one example, the nation’s emergency rooms are crumbling into decay. Emergency rooms do not make a profit. They have very high overhead because they have to be ready for, well, emergencies. And many people who use emergency rooms can’t pay the bills. So many hospitals are closing or cutting back or downsizing emergency rooms.
(And the practice of using emergency rooms as default “free” clinics for the poor and uninsured not only adds to the burdens on emergency rooms; it is also probably the least cost-effective way anyone could think of to provide last-ditch health services to the poor and uninsured, which is another big reason our nations spends so much on health care.)
Anyway — it appears that if somebody is making money off a particular gizmo or course of treatment, the health insurance industry manages to find room in its heart to pay for it. However, the private insurance companies routinely refuse to cover people who have even minor “preexisting conditions” and drop customers whose ailments are money-losers. One of the reasons the medical-industrial complex gets away with scamming us is that doctors themselves often do not know which treatment is most effective. There is remarkably little effectiveness testing going on. “Drug and device makers have no reason to finance such trials, because insurers now pay for expensive treatments even if they aren’t more effective,” Leonhardt writes. So the doctors often have little else to go on but what the sales reps tell them. And some doctors are as keen to boost their revenue streams as anyone else in the complex.
A critical part of President Obama’s health care proposal is called “comparative effectiveness research (CER).” CER is not, as the Right claims, a plan that would allow the government to countermand a doctor’s decisions based on cost-effectiveness studies. The common claim on the Right that CER is about rationing is a lie. The point behind CER is to fund the kind of effectiveness testing that is not being done now and provide that information to doctors and patients, so that doctors and patients can make more informed decisions about what course of treatment to pursue. The mendacious anti-reform talking points repeated ad nauseam by the dittoheads of the Right are generated by a network of right-wing think tanks and other organizations that exist solely to influence public opinion. This network is very good at getting their propaganda uncritically parroted throughout mass media and the Internet, repeated over and over until it becomes “common knowledge.” And in many cases the deep pockets funding those think tanks are also heavily invested in the medical-industrial complex. And round and round it goes …
Read it all at The Mahablog
"It shouldn't be this hard to get the healthcare you seek. A sister's cancer and son's mugging illustrate what it takes."
It doesn't have to be this difficult, of course, to get proper care when you're sick or injured. But we've got an insane system, protected by powerful lobbies that put dollars ahead of health.
President Obama seems to have lost the nerve to follow through on his onetime support for a single-payer universal healthcare system. Now that he's elbow-deep in the muck, with vested interests swarming like leeches, it's not clear what he wants or how long the American public's overwhelming desire for change will be ignored.
Read it all....
Universal Health Care - Change.org
From Remarks as delivered by Kelly Cuvar at a roundtable on health care reform with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
The second thing you need to know about me is that I was diagnosed with cancer ten years ago, when I was nineteen. I have had cancer ever since then. I have never been in remission. What I didn't know then -- my young nineteen year old self didn't have a clue -- was that for the rest of my life, the fact that I had cancer would be considered a huge hurdle that was made manifest in every aspect of my life -- that I'd have a pre-existing condition forever, and it would creep into everything I ever did.
Surviving and learning to live with cancer would not just be managing the disease physically, which is hard enough. The American health care system in general and my insurance providers in particular have been a greater affliction for me than cancer. Every single financial and life decision I make revolves around maintaining my ability to get vital health care. Where I live, if I can marry, if I can buy a home, changing my career, going back to school -- it is all mediated through my disease. I am going to be absolutely honest with you: having to worry about insurance, and to constantly fight for and pay for and find money for payments, is worse than having cancer. I know that sounds ludicrous, but I am better able to deal with dealing with my illness than I am when I am fighting with insurers, or now that I am unemployed, worrying about how I can maintain my coverage. This is more stressful than any of the treatments I've received over the last ten years, and any of the consequences of them.
What the cancer hasn’t been able to do, our broken health care system has done: force me to deal with anxiety on levels that I've never known before. I am frightened, and it is all I think about.
If you can say with honesty that worrying about insurance is more stressful than worrying about being ill with a chronic and life-threatening disease, what does that say about the state of healthcare right now?
60 Minutes - CBS News: "The economic crisis is hurting society's most vulnerable. For some people these days - especially cancer patients - losing a job and health insurance could mean losing life-saving care as cash-strapped public hospitals are forced to cut critical charity care.
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reports from Las Vegas, where cancer sufferers were recently told the county hospital would no longer provide outpatient cancer treatments, leaving uninsured patients searching for help." "I don't want to die. I shouldn't have to die. This is a county hospital. This is for people that, like me, many people have lost their insurance, have not any other resources. I mean I was a responsible person. I bought my house. I put money away. I raised my two children. And now I have nothing. You know my house isn’t worth anything. I have no money. And I said 'What do I do, but what do all these other people do after me?' 'And they said we don't know,'"
Although the study did not explore the reasons for high unemployment, Dr. de Boer speculated that disability played a leading role. Many survivors, she said, may simply be unable to return to work. read more | digg story
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