I don’t really like using other people’s grief to make political points, so I’ve held off on this for some time. But I can’t hold it back. So I’ll mostly let the person involved do the telling here.
Many of the readers here know Ron, one of my oldest friends, whose blog is also served from faultline.org’s world HQ.
Those of you who know her very likely remember that two years ago, she had to say goodbye to her younger sister Jeanne.
A few days after Jeanne passed, Ron posted this on her blog:
I saw with my own sore eyes a letter from the hospital in Miami telling my sister that if she would deposit $338,000.00 in a trust(?) account and $174,000.00(?) in a second savings account “for contingencies” she would be on the transplant list, given physical qualifications, immediately. Question marks in parens indicate that I have a less than perfect memory of the account type and the precise second sum—it was well above $100,000.00 but below $200,000.00.
If the lot of us had been able to raise about $500,000.00 three or four weeks ago, my sister would be alive.
As she caught her breath, Ron shared some more details with her readers, and we began to get a picture of the horror her family had been through. (Was still going through.) (Is still going through.) You can read the full post here, but a salient detail from that horrifying post:
The history of cancer, however, and I suppose the clotting disorder, meant she was turned down time after time for medical insurance under the “pre-existing condition” catch. Her partner Tommy is a self-employed building contractor. He could get insurance for himself, but not for Jeanne. There’s a fat stack of turndown letters about this in her records.
Because she lived with Tommy—she certainly couldn’t afford to live alone, though she was productive as anyone could be, and I’ll go into the particulars later—his income meant she didn’t qualify for Medicaid, though she and they kept trying to get it. That was the glitch that kept her in the Orlando hospital when she’d been approved for a “legit” transfer via Life Flight helicopter to Jackson Memorial for a liver transplant.
As Jeanne got sicker and sicker in the Orlando hospital, Tommy’s sisters and brother (the Pitbull Squad from Jersey) besieged the offices of the local state and federal representatives and Social Security to get the paperwork finished. The hospital financial office stopped the transfer on a Thursday; Jeanne got worse the next day, and the Orlando doctors stopped saying they could stabilize her until the paperwork went through.
It was a weekend, and offices were closed.
The next day or so, Ron wrote this:
During the first phase of the adventure in Miami, my sister Julie was explaining the whole mess—insurance, Medicaid, the $338,000.00 letter— to a friend who’d called to say Good Luck.
“Wait a minute,” said the friend. “You mean that when I donate my organs, they go to whoever can afford them??”
Yeah, that’s pretty much how it works. QED.
I never met Jeanne. Wish I had. But she and her family have been a lot on my mind the past couple weeks, as GOP extremists and their loyal sheep have bleated infuriating lies about “death panels” and the extreme rationing of health care that will inevitably follow any attempt to create a system that does not exist primarily to generate wealth for insurers.
I’m uninsured right now, as a result of the divorce. I’m reasonably lucky at the moment: aside from a couple teeth that could stand fixing, I’m in really good health. Once the opportunity presents itself, I’ll likely be able to buy insurance. (Such luck.) But I am — we all are — one careless driver or faulty product or incompetent food server away from medically generated bankruptcy.
I flatter myself that I’m not the kind of person that would ever wish the kind of pain Ron and her family went through on anyone.
I hate that the wingnuts make me question that conviction.
I hate that the wingnuts make me question that conviction
You’re a better man than I, Chris. There is no fate bad enough for the evil bastards who spread the lies (Newt Gingrich, Chuck Grassley, etc ad nauseam). That they concern a bill which is largely a patch-up job, with minimal concessions (if any) from the insurance companies, just makes it that much more sickening.
Come to Canada. There’s even some desert here, if I can remember where we put it…
Not meaning to go OT, but as a Canadian, it really pisses me off when I hear outright lies being spewed around about how our system doesn’t work, etc.. as an argument against universal health coverage. A couple of years ago, I had occasion to have breakfast with a doctor in northern California. He asked me a number of questions about how our system works. I explained how things went when my dad was diagnosed with kidney cancer after going to the ER with abdominal pains. Within 3 days, he had had all of his tests and had a kidney was removed. Granted, he didn’t live more than a year, but the prognosis is rarely good with KC anyhow. In any case, this N. CA. doctor said that was all he had to hear to know that our Canadian system is working just fine. He said he almost couldn’t imagine things working that fast in the states. The other thing that I learned during the months when I cared for my dad was that some people in the states are denied surgery to remove a disease kidney. I found this out after going onto a KC forum where most of the members were from the U.S. There were a number of people who were suffering greatly from their tumors, but they weren’t being offered surgery as they didn’t have enough money to pay for it and, as the usual prognosis is death within about a year, no one wanted to operate on such a poor credit risk. I was blown away by this info. Similarly, when my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-small cell lung cancer in Nov. 2007, he received excellent care up here in Ontario. Unfortunately, it’s an incurable disease, but he was offered every form of treatment we could throw at the cancer, and his last week in ICU, he had 2 full-time RNs caring for him 24 hours a day. Up here, we never see any invoices for care so I have no idea what that must have cost, but in the U.S,, I’m sure that I would have been bankrupted. All this to say, I hope that Americans aren’t hoodwinked by the crap that is being served up by those who are trying to misrepresent universal health care.
Not off-topic at all, Bev. Thank you. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are in fact hoodwinked by the lies.
That’s exactly right. It stuns me the amount of garbage Americans are fed about how other countries’ systems don’t work. The healthcare system in Canada is top of the list of things I miss about my home and native land.
I never met Jeanne. Wish I had.
You should’ve. She was a pistol.
You can imagine what I think and how I feel about ex-gov Palin’s recent bon mot in particular.
I have to stop there just now. “Is still going through.” is precisely correct. Keep spreading the word; that’s what I want while I’m too damned paralyzed to do it myself.
In Canada, breast cancer kills 50% of its victims, in the US, breast cancer kills 25%.
Did you know that under ObamaCare, the government will actually make conservative Americans wait three months or longer before they can extract fake statistics from their asses?
From the Canadian Cancer Society:
The sad thing about Mike’s little factoid is that it and many others are making the rounds of the conservative media, and people are just accepting them at face value.
For example, this gem from the National Review;
Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes
The NCPA is partly financed by the insurance industry. Quel surprise.
A bit of research shows that mortality rates for prostate cancer are almost identical in the US, Canada and the UK (about 25 per 100,000).
And what’s really pathetic about all the hue and cry of these folks is that this isn’t even health care reform that’s being proposed. What’s being proposed is a reform of the health insurance system.
*sigh*
I know an Objectivist libertarian who thinks the solution for those lacking health coverage is that charity should take care of them. Where, pray tell, was the wealthy benefactor to wire $300,000 to Ron’s sister?
Orange, I am positive you are mistaken.
One day I rode on a bus in LA, behind a young man with golf ball-sized growth dangling from his earlobe. I’d never seen anything like it but I immediately realized why: back home in Canada, he would simply have walked into any hospital, flashed his health card and had the damn thing removed. That something so simple is so bloody difficult for so many people is heartbreaking.