I'd like you to meet some sick Americans.
A woman who's battled cancer not once but twice. She was a privileged American. She had for profit AHIP insurance.
A family with a young child diagnosed with leukemia. They got scammed with Mega AHIP Life.
Where to start, I ask myself scratching my head. How can this be? When will this long American nightmare end?
Here's where to start. A word to the wise. Don't get cancer if you live in America. If the cancer doesn't destroy you, the medical bills will. And you will probably find yourself not just battling cancer but also battling your for-profit insurance company.
Don't get cancer, even if you're insured. For-profit healthcare exists to take your money then deny you care.
Cancer and financial ruin, it's as American as apple pie.
But don't take my word for it.
Read this scathing denunciation of "commericialized" AMERICAN healthcare by Arnold Relman, M.D. Dr. Relman is a professor emeritus of medicine and of social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Relman is not a blogger, his is the voice of authority.
Here is Dr. Relman's warning to those Canadians thinking of monkeying around with their healthcare system. Here's his warning to those who want to give the Canadian system some American for-profit flourishes. He has one word for them. Don't.
What Canadians should learn from the U.S. health care disaster
Policy-makers need only look to the United States for the evidence such claims have no merit. The U.S. experience shows that private, for-profit medical insurance and investor-owned medical facilities are a bad deal for the public, and that a health-care system that encourages physicians to behave like private entrepreneurs leads to extravagant costs.
. . .If Canada were so unwise as to allow privatization to grow in its health-care system, it would sooner or later experience all of the problems driving the U.S. system toward collapse. One thing is certain: When medical care and health insurance are allowed to become private businesses, costs go up and patients with little or no resources do not get the care they need. That is the lesson Canadians should learn from the United States.
So how does our commercialized and corrupt system heap misery and hardship on untold numbers of cancer patients.
Here's the misery of one woman. As you read this keep in mind, today it's Kathleen, tomorrow it will be you or me.
But it won't ever be a member of Congress, a United States Senator or any elected official. Has anyone ever heard of an elected official filing for bankruptcy?
Meet Kathleen Aldrich. Kathleen had for-profit health insurance. Kathleen is now facing financial armageddon.
Kathleen Aldrich, financially ruined by two bouts with ovarian cancer, is not who you might assume she is.
She raised three kids as a single mom. She worked hard for years. She had good jobs. She paid her bills. She lived in a nice house and drove a nice car. She had a decent credit rating. She had health insurance.
These are hard working, tax-paying American citizens who had the bad luck to get sick. But the political class and their insurance industry benefactors don't give a rat's ass for you or me. Get that through your head.
Forget Woody Guthrie. This land ain't made for you and me.
Now she has a record of bankruptcy and is the embodiment of the fear that nags at millions of U.S. families: that they are but one medical calamity away from losing everything. Like Aldrich, they — and perhaps you — could be.
"I didn’t do anything wrong," Aldrich says thoughtfully, sitting in the neat, pale green living room of her tiny stucco duplex in the middle of this mostly middle-class American town. "I don’t see that I did."
I'm sorry to break the news, Kathleen, you made a couple of big mistakes. Mistake number one: you live in America circa 2007. Big mistake number two: you got sick.
These are two deadly mistakes.
If you have the stomach, you can read the rest of Kathleen's frightening story. Remember, it will be you or me one day soon.
Let's move on to another American family.
Somewhere on the cutting room floor of Michael Moore's new movie "Sicko" is the story of the Main family of Port Charlotte: Tom, 34, Hesper, 29, Crispin, 7, and 5-year-old Kenny, who is blond, blue-eyed and battling leukemia.
The Mains say their real pain comes from this country's health care system. Like other families portrayed in the movie, the Mains have been falling through what they thought was a safety net.
With $500,000 in medical bills and an insurance company that has paid out just $45,000 since their son was diagnosed 18 months ago, the Mains may face bankruptcy.
Tom Main, a self-employed electrician making about $40,000 a year, had no health insurance and did not qualify for the Florida KidCare state insurance program after moving here from Colorado.
He joined the National Association for the Self-Employed, making him eligible for health coverage. In December 2005, an agent from MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company sold them a family policy at $227 a month.
Hesper Main said that before the policy became active, she called a doctor because Kenny appeared "listless and tired." He did not get better. Two days after the new policy kicked in, Hesper Main said, she took Kenny to a local hospital and the family's nightmare began.
An ambulance took Kenny to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, where he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Kenny finally has care from Florida KidCare.
I'm going to end by sharing a piece of an email I received from a Kossack the other day. This Kossack has experience with the healthcare system in a poor Third World Country.
You might be interested to know how healthcare in Colombia compares to healthcare in the United States, the richest country on the planet.
I took my wife who is Colombian to see Sicko a few weeks ago, she was shocked and terrified, but more importantly very much disillusioned. As a Colombian she has always seen the US as the beacon of civilization and development for all the world. She did not realize how terribly corrupt this nation has become just in the Healthcare sector alone. You see we lived a year in a third world South American country (Colombia) where the health care system really is much better than it is here. Colombia is number 22 on the WHO list, while the US is 37. How is it that a third world tin horn country in the midst of a vicous civil war can offer such a vastly better healthcare system to it's citizens than this nation can?
In Colombia every citizen has access to a publicly available policy (called EPS) for about $20 per month. Yes you read that right, it's about 40,000 pesos which is about $20. Every citizen is required by law to have EPS. In addition to this, private insurance also exists and while it's a lot more expensive, about $125 per month for the very best that money can buy, it is more widely accepted with fewer restrictions. Ironically, the second part of that is exactly the opposite here. Here private insurance has far more restrictions than medicaid/medicare.
I don't pretend to have the answers to our national healthcare crisis, but it's important for people to know what they are really dealing with. I know an awful lot of insured people who have no idea how vulnerable they really are. I really think there needs to be more emphasis on that point. If we expect this to change I think it's important that the biggest voting block be convinced and made aware how vulnerable they really are. Far too many are oblivious, especially the younger among us.
Kind of knocks the wind out of you.
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