Friday, March 02, 2007

More on Socialized Medicine

If you can take it, I mean:

This is over at Tbogg's site. He's been reading wingers again, comments from Conservatives who got all compassionate over that child who died because his mother was uninsured, and sounded off about in online.

I warn you, it will make you ill.

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2007/02/kind-of-people-we-would-normally-shun.html


This story hits home for me because the kid had a tooth that abscessed last year -- and I HAVE dental insurance. But we didn't go to the dentist right away either, even though we have insurance, even though we have a dentist, because of all the reasons mentioned in Tbogg's comments: because even WITH insurance, dental work is pricey, because you tend to hope, when there is NO extra money in the budget (and there ain't, in ours) and it's something pricey like dental work, that it will go just away -- and it usually does, you know, with a toothache. Usually it's just a bruised nerve or whatnot. Only this time not. Same thing for this kid's mother. Only she didn't have a dentist she could call at seven a.m. on a Sunday morning like I could and say, uh, listen? This doesn't look too good. She was fucked. And so was her kid.

And so, frankly, is our health care system. Why SHOULD I have to play that kind of game with my kid's health? Why should any mother? (I'll tell you why I *am* -- because my health insurance costs me nearly $500 dollars a month and still covers almost nothing, that's why. Because my health care costs are eating up some reprehensible amount of my income, for which I am getting, as you can see, very fucking little, except the privilege of feeling more desperate each year.) Something needs fixed. And it is not the attitude of that child's mother. I'll tell you that for nothing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Until I took my current job, our insurance premiums were over $500 a month, and our prescriptions and co-pays were what we thought was high then. Now, although our premiums are lower, our co-pays are higher, and there's this fresh hell about prescriptions. We are required to get all of them by mail. And if you need a brand name instead of an ineffective generic (it really does happen), our prescription cost goes from $10 to $647.78 (just for that one drug). Notes from doctors don't help. Evidence that this particular generic is known not to work for many people doesn't help. You're just f***ed. Can't afford it. Can't afford not to. Things can always get worse. Oh yeah, we don't have vision or dental coverage either.

And we wonder why Canadians and Brits manage to be so much healthier than we are. Even their poor people are healthier than our rich people. They obviously know something that we do not. -L