Because Health Care Is Not a Right

The long summer has finally come to an end, along with August’s endless supply of bread and circuses we all enjoyed so much. The spectacle of so many angry elderly folks demanding that the government stay OUT of their Medicare, the long parade of signs depicting the President of the United States as Adolph Hitler for daring to suggest there’s something wrong that needs fixing, and a long line of leftover Republican lawmakers acting as town hall ringmasters for the Greatest Show On Earth. Brought to us by Big Pharma and the for-profit insurance industry lobbies who have spent nearly $1.5 million dollars a day to make darned sure that Health Insurance executives never have to give up a single vacation McMansion swimming pool, winter in Bermuda or multi-million dollar bonus just so we and our families can obtain a basic level of health care.

Here’s what some Hollywood actors have to say in defense of those pitiful corporate victims of possible competition in todays health care market… Enjoy!

Useful link:
New health care plan and your wallet

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Those So-Desirable Uninsureds

Those of us who have spent a good part of our lives not being rich – or even middle-middle class – have likely spent quite a bit of our lives without health insurance as well. Or with junk insurance that doesn’t actually cover anything but Big Ticket Items such as major accidents and illnesses. And many of us have unfortunately discovered that junk insurance won’t pay for Big Ticket Items either, if ever those happen to accrue.

Thus we have likely been watching the D.C. Street Theater (recently back from nationwide tour over the August recess at Town Hall meetings in every state) with some amazement. Knowing that the truth is that health care is the third leading cause of death, perhaps wondering if greater access for some of the ~50 million Americans without insurance is actually going to “fix” what’s wrong with health care in this country. Which is #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations in both access and outcomes.

One of the more “important” results of what is now more honestly being called Health Insurance Reform is the promise of government subsities to enroll as many of those ~50 million uninsured Americans in for-profit health care as possible. This is of course a way to compensate for-profit insurers for new regulations that will prevent them from refusing to insure those with pre-existing conditions, rescinding policies when the person gets sick or injured, and other racketeering practices that have 3 of every 4 of the “medically bankrupt” bankrupt despite HAVING insurance.

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Bailouts Get Bigger When Banks Fail

…and HCR update

The biggest bank failure of 2009 happened last week when the FDIC moved to shut down Colonial BancGroup of Alabama, along with four other banks, bringing the total thus far this year to more than 70. A quick deal with BB&T to purchase Colonial caused its shares to rise. FDIC will be shouldering much of the losses, of course, which adds billions to the bailout of the banking system while at the same time working to further bank consolidation for the wealthiest banks still standing.

Such situations are a ‘win-lose’ proposition. Win for BB&T and their stockholders, lose for We the Taxpayers. This scheme where the feds cap the buyer’s losses at taxpayer expense is just another outrage to the hard-pressed public at a time when all the glorious pronouncements of economic recovery have yet to even begin to touch the lives of the general public still losing jobs at a high rate while no new jobs seem to be forthcoming.

And on top of the still-dismal economic situation for average people in this country, now we have the extremely contentious health care reform debate ongoing that looks more and more like bad street theater every day. Between the noisy hoards of idle old folks bused around the country to shut down discussion of provisions during Town Hall meetings held by vacationing congresscritters, and the absurd lies being spewed by the usual suspects at FoxNews and right wing radio, it’s looking more and more like the final result will be a significant new tax on the working poor that will be earmarked directly to the health insurance industry by means of mandatory purchase of junk insurance.

The situation is really health insurance reform, though reform isn’t really a good title either considering how much the Death by Spreadsheet crowd will end up getting from the public directly and from the government as subsidies. Yes, they will have to stop excluding anyone with a pre-existing condition, retroactively canceling policies if the insured person gets sick, and simply not paying for covered health care after the fact. But they will more than make up for however much this costs them by the ~40 million new policies the uninsured will have to purchase, and with government subsidies for many of those as well as losses incurred by having to honor their contracts.

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Health Care Kabuki Theater Deluxe

Those of us attempting to live on what was a shoestring budget even before the Great Unending Recession/Depression have probably been watching the large insanity of vacationing Congresscritters attempting to hold Town Hall meetings with their constituents back home with some bemusement. It’s no secret that the WingNut Network [a.k.a. Fox] and Hate Radio pundits have been inciting their faithful dummies to riot, since this has been ongoing ever since they lost the election last November in a big way. Between the clueless idiots who can’t believe a black man is a real American citizen (or that exotic Hawaii is actually a state) and the Bermuda shorts and gray hair crowd shouting “Keep the government OUT of my Medicare!” one really does have to wonder if maybe there’s something in the water making people lose what few IQ points they might have had back in kindergarten.

Some of us also know that going to a doctor regularly if you aren’t actually sick is not wise, thus are probably better off if we don’t suffer some chronic condition with our very limited access to the health care system than we might be if we had annual check-ups and the ability to demand whatever drug is advertised on television nightly. While it’s a sad truth that ~50 million Americans have no access to the health care system – and that’s an insurance issue – I haven’t seen anybody talking much lately about the health care system itself, which just happens to be the third leading cause of death in the United States.

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Uninsured? More Ways to Survive

More than 40 million Americans – including children – have no health insurance. As the economy continues to weaken and good jobs are outsourced to countries where universal care exempts businesses from having to carry the health care burden, millions more are being thrown into the ranks of the uninsured. Then there are those who have changed jobs, and encountered insurers who simply will not cover them due to pre-existing conditions. These days if you’ve ever had treatment for things like acne, high cholesterol or carpel tunnel you can find yourself on the growing list of the “Uninsurable.”

Now, if you don’t mind jumping serious hoops and get an early start in the fiscal year, states do have sliding scale plans and Medicaid allotments. If you are covered by one of these, you do NOT count among the officially uninsured. In my officially “economically depressed” region, approximately two thirds of the citizens qualify for food stamps and medical care, but there’s only enough money to cover less than half of them. The rest simply do without, at least until they simply can’t do without anymore. The cost of indigent care at our few public hospitals is yet another perpetually unpaid bill.

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Necessary Household Basics: First Aid

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 3: Discouraging Bugs, Treating Boo-Boos

In this last installment of the series examining inexpensive and natural alternatives to the many household products people spend so much money on through the year, I want to look at the basic summertime first aid kit.

My family lives in the “deep woods” that Deep Woods Off^TM was invented to de-bug. We have lots of company during the summer season, adults and children. There’s not much one can do about nasty encounters with aggressive poisonous snakes (copperheads are much more aggressive than timber rattlers, who live in the area but are hardly ever seen) or bone breaks or serious puncture wounds or cuts. Those just have to go to the ER, best thing to do is make that happen as quickly as possible. But there are a host of lesser injuries and situations that can be treated adequately at home, without the fancy, expensive products that contribute so much to a weekly grocery bill.

In the first installment of the series I listed the basic ingredients to purchase – brand name or generic (I get generic, but brands aren’t that much more expensive) borax, baking soda, rubbing alcohol, white vinegar, basic soap flakes (or liquid soap made from your disintegrating bath bars), and added ammonia. In the second installment I gave some recipes for laundry soap, kitchen and bath scouring powders, drain cleaner, surface disinfectants, etc. Now, using the same ingredients (plus a few things from the garden) let’s make the first aid kit and general insect management substances…
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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3

Primary and Emergency Care

In response to increasing unaffordability of health insurance in America and justifying his repeated vetos of State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP] expansions, President George W. Bush declared during an appearance in Cleveland last July that:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As if that weren’t clueless enough, the New York Times reports today (April 23) that one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealth, announced disappointing first-quarter earnings (profits), saying the weakening Economy Has Dented Its Prospects. In short, as premiums rise, employers are dropping insurance plans for their employees, more employees are opting out, and rising unemployment is reflected in increasing numbers of uninsured.

The for-profit industry has also shot itself in the foot by increasing premiums to protect its profits over the quickly rising cost of care, not covering people who may have health problems, and simply refusing to pay for health care for the insured. Medical bills now account for a full half of all bankruptcies in the US, and ER treatment is NOT “free.”

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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2

Necessary Medicines

The New York Times reported on Monday, April 14 that Co-Payments Soar for Drugs With High Prices as the nation’s largest health insurers struggle to keep their profits high and their payments for health care low. The new pricing system forces patients taking name-brand medications to pay a percentage of the cost rather than a fixed co-payment of $10 to $30 a month for each medication they take.

The situation, and plans for a public demonstration in San Francisco during the AHIP annual meeting on June 19th are outlined in Insurers target the sickest: Say bye bye to $20 prescription co-pays.

This means that the burden of increasingly expensive health care now affects the insured, who may now have to pay thousands of dollars a month for medications in addition to their high monthly premiums and treatment co-pays and deductibles. America’s sickest citizens are once again being abandoned by a system that was originally designed to spread the costs of their care across a large pool that includes healthier people. Insurers say the new system will keep everyone’s premiums down, just at the time of year that Americans are discovering that they must pay double or more for the same health insurance they had last year. That’s not a very impressive system, considering that all other developed nations on the planet have universal health care.

Thus this installment of the series of inexpensive health care tips will offer some alternatives for obtaining drugs that may be beyond your ability to afford.

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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro

A few months after moving to our mountain retreat I got bit by a tiny deer tick while working to clear the neglected garden for planting. Soon I had fever and swollen glands, seriously painful joints and a nasty rash surrounding the bite site. After a few weeks of this we finally got a little ahead on basics, so I went to the local doctor. He has a little clinic next to the grocery store, comes to town twice a week.

First thing was to check in and lay $60 on the counter up front before the doctor would see me, given that I had no insurance. If I’d had insurance, it would have been $10. Then the assistant took my vitals and I was asked to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of obese locals and their obese children. I guessed immediately that the primary cause of illness in this rural area had to do with America’s basic poor-person bad diet. But that wasn’t my problem…

$150 worth of in-office blood tests and a ‘scrip for a week’s worth of antibiotic later (plus the original $60 just to see him), I found out I’d contracted Lyme disease. He made another appointment for his next in-town day, said he’d give me another week’s worth of antibiotics every week until I was cured. Ha!

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Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

Something a lot of people in this country don’t know is that the various state and federal health care plans for the poor do not cover most poor people or their children. In other words, you may be on unemployment and food stamps, but if your state has a fixed budget for Medicaid, SCHIP and other programs, you probably won’t get health care coverage. In my state the cap has remained in place for years, so in a region (southern Appalachia) where 3 out of every 5 people qualify for state and federal aid because their incomes are below the poverty line, 1.5 of those 3 won’t get any aid at all.

Then there are the “working poor” – those who work as many hours a day as is possible at as many jobs as they can get, but whose income still falls to poverty level or below. These people generally have no health insurance and no state/federal coverage. Not because they choose not to purchase expensive insurance, but because it’s simply not available to them. And on top of this are all those in the “lower middle class” who may have junk insurance through their employers with deductibles so high they simply cannot afford health care, or whose insurers routinely refuse to cover any and all claims.

And on top of that there is the whole rest of the middle class, who have exactly the same problem with their insurance companies – they simply refuse to pay for health care, leaving all but the very rich (who can pay out of pocket) without usable access to health care and one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.

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