I am building up a head of steam over the health insurance system in the U.S. I suspect that there will be several entries on this subject in the near future, and it’s likely to be an ongoing subject.<\/p>\n
\nMy second sister has been in pain for 18 months. It’s been gradually growing, but for at least the last six months, and probably more, it’s moved from pain to UNBEARABLE pain. She has been given drug after drug to try to ease the pain, and nothing is working.
\nMy sister has always been a petite woman, and in the last year she has lost 25 pounds. She hurts so much she can’t eat. She has no appetite, and nothing stays down.
\nI want you to know that she is going through this because she is covered by an HMO which will not allow her to change doctors. Her doctor doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do for her, and the HMO will not allow them to sever their relationship, so that she can find a doctor who CAN help her.
\nAt the insistence of her daughter, she went to the doctor, and he put her in the hospital to have two tests done. They had been talking about these tests for some time, but there was a delay of months in getting them done. She had a meyelogram, which is an unpleasant procedure involving a spinal tap. It didn’t reveal the problem. She had a bone scan. Same result. Just before she was forced to leave the hospital by her HMO, she had an EMG test, and FINALLY……after EIGHTEEN MONTHS of severe pain….they discovered she has a pinched nerve in her spine.
\nI want to know why it took EIGHTEEN MONTHS for someone to finally see to it that she got the right test. Why has the government allowed the insurance industry to determine what is right for a patient? Why is the federal government allowing insurance companies to take the money in return for a policy that is not worth the paper it’s printed on? That’s fraud in my book, and it’s prevalent.
\nI thought we had a great health care system compared to the countries that have Nationalized medicine, but the truth is, if you can’t afford premiums of more than $700 a month, your coverage is worthless. Those who have the money to pay for premiums, or pay for procedures and doctor’s visits, have fine health care. The rest of the country is in serious condition, with little or no assistance with medical problems.
\nMore than HALF of the people who go bankrupt in the U.S. annually, have done so because of the high cost of medical care, and the lack of appropriate insurance. It’s well past time to overhaul both the medical industry and the insurance industry.
\nI may be just one person writing about this, but there is a ground swell of complaint growing, and soon this issue is going to be on the front burner. Social Security needs to be redesigned. We need to bring our people home from the Middle East. But health care should not be taking a back seat to those issues.
\nLook at it this way, if people are not well, they are either not working, or not working to capacity, so you are loosing man hours. If you loose man hours, you have a lower gross income, and that results in less money coming in from taxes. Less money from taxes ultimately has to mean, fewer government programs.
\nBite the bullet. Ignore the insurance company lobbyists and DO SOMETHING ABOUT HEALTH INSURANCE!! NOW!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am building up a head of steam over the health insurance system in the U.S. I suspect that there will be several entries on this subject in the near future, and it’s likely to be an ongoing subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.redeaglespirit.com\/arrrgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}