Mutant Poodle

From now on, all my new posts will be at the migrated Mutant Poodle site.  Click on through.

Note: I am in the process of migrating Mutant Poodle. This post can be found at the new Mutant Poodle site.

This time, a story from twitter friend Misha which illustrates how the failures of health care in this country have immediate AND lasting effects:

….We lived in a cockroach infested trailer with no air conditioning in the summer, and no heat in the winter. If the car was broken down, we walked until money could be saved for repairs. Often, our dinners were eggs, ramen noodles, beans, or “whatever we could find.” My mother brought in extra money by baby sitting children.

You can look at the situation and say that government is not responsible, and I would agree. There are not many sympathetic characters here. But here is my experience and why healthcare is so vital to children.

Both doctor and dentist visits were only on an emergency situation. We went to the dentist when our teeth hurt so bad we couldn’t stand it anymore. Often we had to get teeth pulled because they were so far gone. We didn’t even know what cleanings or preventive care was. My sister lost most of her back teeth and as an adult had to chew somewhat like a rabbit. She has since had her teeth repaired to an extent, but has spent over $8,000 just to get a normal bite.

I spent thousands of dollars myself on root canals and doing everything possible not to lose any teeth once I was an adult. I was so lucky to have been spared most of that.

However, I am legally blind in one eye, and found out that had I just worn a patch over my good eye for part of my childhood, I would probably have normal vision. Now, God forbid, anything happen to my “normal” eye, I would likely not be able to see anything but a blur.

But the worst part of it is, as a child, the feeling that YOU are to blame for the financial hardships of the family. When you go to the county hospital, the bills are still due. And if you don’t pay them, they are sent to collection agencies. They go on your credit report. The county hospital is not “free”. I remember my parents discussing, “well, Robin’s sick, we’ll probably have to take her to the hospital. We just can’t get ahead.” I don’t think my parents meant to make us feel badly, but we did.

Once when we were kids, we broke a glass cake pan, and threw it away in the trash. It broke clean in half. My sisters and I continued to play, and my sister slipped in the area where the cake pan was cleaned up. The broken piece sliced her arm so badly we had to call the ambulance and it required a hospital stay. After she was cared for, the bills kept coming and coming. I remember watching my mother cry after taking phone calls from collection agencies. I remember her and my father fighting and him telling her what a failure he was. I remember my father crying. The pain that my parents felt was almost unbearable to me as a child.

We never did get back on our feet. I caught something from a friend at school. My younger sister fell out of a tree and broke her arm. It was always something. And it seemed like the “something” was always medical bills. Eventually, my parents filed for bankruptcy. “They” came and took the very few things we had left. My father passed away at 57 years old, and I never, not once, saw him proud of himself.

So - lose the health care lottery, go bankrupt and see your children have a lifetime of preventable medical issues. And those are just the easily discernible effects. The thing is, in the current system, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Note: I am in the process of migrating Mutant Poodle. This post can be found at the new Mutant Poodle site.

I have argued before, in this space, that anecdotes have limited utility in the health care debate.

Where they are helpful is in illustrating a theme. In this case, the theme is the failure of our for-profit health insurance system to actually provide insurance to everyone who wants it.

Today, David’s letter to Barack Obama:

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for your leadership on Healthcare reform. This is a very personal issue for me. It’s not abstract. It’s not optional. You see, my youngest son, Woody, has been severely disabled since birth. He spent his first 6 weeks of life in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Such a unit costs up to $50,000 per day. It is a staggering sum to start life. Since then, he has been hospitalized dozens of times, and had numerous surgeries. His last unexpected hospitalization over Christmas 2008 was over 30 days long. His surgery was over 11 hours. We estimate the costs of that stay to be in excess of $560,000. Getting true costs are almost impossible, given how hospitals bill, how insurance companies pay, and how these things are reported to us, the consumers. We may never know the full cost.

Additionally Woody is fed through a gastronomy tube (G-Tube). He is unable to get any nutrition orally. His food is a special, prescription, liquid diet costing over $1,800 per month. Every month. For life. It will only get more expensive as he grows and requires more.

If you’re getting the impression that my medical bills are astronomical, you’re partially right. I am one of the lucky ones. I have coverage through my employer (for now). My insurance company (United Healthcare) does an admirable job of denying claims and refusing payment. Luckily, my son also qualified for Medicaid here in North Carolina — he had the G-Tube, shunt tubes in his head, and a tracheostomy so he got in on the “3-Tubes” loophole — so his out-of-pocket costs are close to zero. But that could change in an instant. North Carolina is considering changing the Medicaid guidelines which would make Woody ineligible. My company is being acquired by another, and I may lose my job. Either one of those things would mean I lose my insurance, and Woody loses his. If he were to get sick again, I’d lose my house and everything I own or ever hope to own. As it stands, Woody is getting dangerously close to his “lifetime maximum benefit” with United Healthcare at which point they will refuse any more claims for him for the rest of his life. He’s 11, and though no one knows how long he will live, it will certainly be longer than United Healthcare will cover him.

In addition, and more frightening, I am uninsurable. With Woody’s history, I could not get insurance on the “Free Market” for any amount of money. Ever. No one will take on a family with a kid that has already cost millions of dollars. He is a pre-existing condition. The daily struggles to care for Woody are nothing in comparison to the fear that I will one day not be able to pay for the care he needs in order to survive. To be blunt, without insurance to pay for his food, Woody will starve to death. For me, and for my family, this is a life or death struggle. The fear of losing my insurance is a daily nightmare.

I have called dozens of Senators and Representatives. I have met with the staff of my congressional delegations. I have written letters to the editor of my local paper. I am doing everything I can think of to work for healthcare reform. I beg you not to give up on the public option. While I would prefer a single-payer solution where I would never have to worry about being covered, at least a public option, for now, would fill the gap. Please remember that this is, for some of us, literally a life or death matter.

Sincerely yours,

David XXXX

Everything is fine here - move along. Seriously - when a child is a pre-existing condition, how does one defend the status quo?

Note: I am in the process of migrating Mutant Poodle. This post can be found at the new Mutant Poodle site.

I’ve shared a rant about my health care history, which is, of course, unfinished, and a more temperate analysis here. And now, from the official mother of Mutant Poodle, her own story, from her column in the Suffolk Times (subscription, so no link):

I once had a friend who remembered her doctor father making his rounds in a horse and buggy. He carried what he needed in a small black bag – instruments, medicines, bandages. He was paid whatever his patients could afford, on the installment plan.

Except for the horse and buggy, the delivery of medical care wasn’t much different in my childhood or that of my children I’m not sure when it changed, but in the early 1980s I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and was stunned by the thousands of dollars billed to my insurance company for the necessary tests – amounts I couldn’t imagine paying myself. I realized then that seeing a doctor was only part of my health care cost and that insurance was a necessity. I also learned that to an insurance company , I had become Typhoid Mary – I’d acquired a pre-existing condition.

Working for a small nonprofit in Washington, D.C., I was able to get insurance, but I was the one who put our group’s rate up. My payments steadily escalated as I grew older, and soon they were more than my rent. I began counting the years before I was eligible for Medicare. Eventually I solved the problem by joining an HMO. But now I could no longer go to my regular doctor, and when I needed to make an appointment, I had to call the branch in Virginia to request permission from not one but two “nurses” – one to route the call and the other to approve my request. Naming my doctor was part of my identification. When the HMO ownership changed many doctors left, mine among them, and I found myself sick but with no way to make an appointment.

That in-between age, 55 to 62, is critical for many people. They are likely to be diagnosed with a chronic illness that, although not life-threatening if treated, makes insurance unobtainable or cost prohibitive. I think of what a cliff-hanger it was for me at 59. These days a healthy friend who’s 60 pays an insurance premium that’s more than her mortgage. And I’m not even touching on the special difficulties of younger people and children.

Working with the frail elderly, I knew Medicare was there for them as a backup, but many times I met people who hadn’t reached the magic age and who either were not sick enough to be considered eligible for medical disability or were caught up in the backlog of pending cases, just as bad today as it was then. Public resources offered patients only trips to D.C. General, a long distance to travel, long waits, more travels and waits for diagnostic tests and medicines. They never saw the same doctor twice.

At work I sometimes collaborated with a free medical clinic where doctors, students, nurses and other volunteers cobbled together free health care for people who couldn’t afford to pay. It was a living, working diagram of the complexities that have come with medical progress. A measure of the clinic’s struggle was that a core founder eventually resigned to become a contemplative nun , believing she could do more good in that role.

Now, as the health care bill is being shaped in Congress, scary scripts advertise that anonymous bureaucrats will dictate our care if we have a government option. I wonder what world the people who write them live in. I have been on Medicare for over 13 years, and the only time anyone dictated to me was when I subscribed to a Medicare “Advantage” program through an insurance company. These days, on the East End, we are seeing an insurance company using its clout to try to shortchange our local hospitals, using the people who rely on its insurance as bargaining chips.

I am still waiting for the conservative solution to all this. Is it permanent access to COBRA? Access, to any citizen, to the US Governments’ (privately provided) health care plans? Is it dropping the age requirement for Medicare?

Tell me it’s tax cuts, and I’ll laugh in your face.

Note: I am in the process of migrating Mutant Poodle. This post can be found at the new Mutant Poodle site.

If you want health care reform in a nutshell, here it is, courtesy of Nancy Najarian of North Carolina:

Health Care Reform as it is being proposed gives us choices. We will have the right to stay alive with medical care or not, just as we have now. It gives us access to affordable and good medical treatment for all, including the 47 million who do not currently have any. If we have preconditions, we will not be excluded from having health insurance. The health insurance that companies will offer will be better, and cost less; there will be basic standards they must meet. The 47 million people who do not currently have healthcare will either receive it under Medicare, Medicaid, or subsidies from the Federal government. None of this will increase our deficit or taxes, in the bills currently under review. In addition, a public option will not increase our deficit or our taxes. It will allow healthy competition for insurance companies…which is exactly what our economy is based on right now.

Discuss.

Oh, and click the link to support the Public Option.

Note: I am in the process of migrating Mutant Poodle. This post can be found at the new Mutant Poodle site.

There’s a famous - and perhaps embellished - story of a 50’s hollywood actress, trapped on a miserable set, trying to figure a way out. She allegedly calls her agent and, after the initial pleasantries, asks him, “who do I have to fuck to get off this movie?”

This came to mind after Barack Obama’s Colorado town hall, where he called out (above) the dishonesty and hypocrisy of those who spread the “Death Panel” rumors about health care reform, which made me wonder: What kind of lummox implies that President Obama wants to kill Granny less than a year after he lost his own precious “Toot”? (And would they have the stones to get into a room with Obama and say it to his face?) More specifically, what does one have to do to get removed from the debate about health reform? When do one’s actions and words signal that one is not a serious participant in the discussion?

In soccer (futbol, to our southern neighbors), the “Deathers” would get a Red Card, and they’d have to sit out the rest of the game.

Since that’s not going to happen - sadly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Dick Morris, and the rest of the right wing crazies will still grace the airwaves tomorrow - I’ll ask another question:

Have you no decency?

It was just over 55 years ago that Joseph Welch asked that of the alcoholic bully from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. It was the beginning of the end for McCarthy - Edward R. Murrow’s takedown followed.

I don’t have starry-eyed illusions about those who are paid to represent us in Washington, and certainly none about those who make a living spreading fear and paranoia. But to those trafficking in this crap, a thimbleful of humanity might come in handy. Not only would it encourage a real discussion, but it might make people like me believe that you are not heartless, soulless hacks concerned with nothing but your own power and self aggrandizement.

Right now, you have a long way to go.

Full Welch-McCarthy transcript after the jump: Read more »