Tag: obamacare

I had a bike accident in my early 30s and smashed in my head and knee. I was taken by ambulance to the hospital, something I would have protested had I been conscious at the time. I was in Emergency for over two hours, laying on a gurney unattended, the curtain around my small area the only thing separating me from ten other people laying on gurneys in the large room. I watched doctors and nurses pass me without stopping to inquire what I was there for. When I finally got a nurse’s attention I asked if I could go, but she insisted a doctor had to sign a release before I’d be allowed to leave.

Three hours into my Emergency visit a doctor came in and examined me. He told me I had a mild concussion that would heal itself, but my kneecap had been crushed in the accident and would have to be surgically repaired. I had no health insurance as a freelance designer, and there was no way in hell I could afford surgery. He assured me if I didn’t have surgery I’d be unable to continue playing racquetball, be drastically limited in most any sport, and probably limp the rest of my life. I left the hospital five hours after arrival in a wheel chair since I couldn’t walk with my knee blown up from the impact with concrete, and crying, knowing I could never afford the surgery he recommended, thinking I’d be crippled for life.

My sister was on a ski trip with her husband the same time I had my bike accident. She fell going downhill and tore her knee up pretty badly, ending up in a private hospital room in Lake Tahoe the same time I was in Emergency down in L.A. While I was still recovering in my rented house a week later, choosing between paying my hospital bill and eating for the next month, she was in surgery having her knee repaired by a renowned orthopedic surgeon at UCLA Medical Center. My sister’s husband was a commercial real estate developer, a millionaire since his early 20s, and they were fully insured.

President Obama lost his mother to ovarian cancer in 1995, around the same time I hurt my knee. In Obama’s own words:
“[My mother] was 52 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.”

Obama’s mother’s employer-provided health insurance covered most of the costs of her medical treatment, leaving her to pay the deductible and uncovered expenses, which came to several hundred dollars per month. Her employer-provided disability insurance denied her claims for uncovered expenses because the insurance company said her cancer was a preexisting condition.

My knee eventually repaired itself for the most part. I was able to play racquetball a couple of months after the accident, and I don’t walk with a limp today. I was lucky. I would have died from cancer, or extended illness, unable to afford any treatment at that time. I did get medical insurance soon after my bike accident from Kaiser HMO, basically the bottom of the barrel in health care. The individual plan cost me $350 a month, lower than anyone else out there, and I lied on their application about per-existing conditions since my knee was basically healed by then.

My sister was back to skiing a month after the surgery. She’s had two more accidents and two more surgeries since, until she gave up skiing as probably not her sport. She can choose to go back to skiing any time, of course, because she’s had the best medical care money can buy.
Millions of Americans aren’t as luck as my sister and her family.

ObamaCare was NEVER about providing medical insurance for the wealthy. They don’t need it. The rich take care of themselves, always. Sometimes, many times, off the money they make on the backs of everyone else, but the bottom line is they don’t need assistance taking care of their own. ObamaCare was intended to cover those who can’t afford medical insurance, or medical care, or pay the outrageous hospital bills whether insured or not, that come after every stay, regardless how nominal.
Read more: http://jcafesin.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-reasoning-behind-obamacare.html