Holy Buck, Fatman!

The above quote was brought to you by our President of the United States. Uh huh. Yeah. Get sick? Just go to the Emergency room! Can’t pay for it, Well TOUGH SHIT!

The question is, will we be wise about how we pay for health care. I believe the best way to do so is to enable more people to have private insurance. And the reason I emphasize private insurance, the best health care plan — the best health care policy is one that emphasizes private health. In other words, the opposite of that would be government control of health care.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, There is a new Michael Moore film out entitled “SiCKO“. MM decided that instead of focusing on the problem of the uninsured here in America, he was going to focus on the insured folks who are getting screwed. Yes, that’s RIGHT—The INSURED that are members of Privately Owned Corporations that put shareholder profit above the health of the individual by systematically denying claims, playing statistics games (you know, deny all claims based on the theory that only a certain percentage will fight back until the claim is paid) and telling Doctors how to administer care to their patients.

It’s a fact that profit is much more important to people like Chimpy McFlysuit. His quote above doesn’t say that profit maximization is what he really advocates, but we all know that is the case. When it comes to the health insurance industry, well..profit is what the shareholders demand. What does that mean? Lifesaving procedures are often denied, resulting in the untimely death of millions of Americans.

I’ve had personal experience with this. When my father was battling cancer, he was often faced with subsequent claim denials for medication and treatment that was vital to his survival. My Mom was a diligent caregiver and spent hours on the phone to get the decisions reversed while my father waited for some Cubicle Monkey, often reading from a script provided by the insurance corporations, to tell him that he could go ahead with his treatment. Did the Cubicle Monkey know what an Autologous Stem cell Transplant was? Probably not, but it was on the list of “shit that you deny automatically because it contains rather large medical terms that probably cost a lot.”

Never mind that it could have saved my father ’s life. He waited for three months for that approval and in those three months his health declined sharply. When they went to collect his Stem Cells for subsequent transplant, his body had failed to make enough due to prolonged exposure to the cancer that was coursing through his veins. In short, the transplant was done, but since the doctors could not adequately collect enough healthy stem cells from him, the transplant failed. Two years later, My father died.

Could prompt approval allowed Dr.s to harvest more healthy Stem Cells, therefore increasing the odds of the transplant grafting? Sure. Was it solely the fault of the Insurance Company? I’m not sure, but I believe that they played a rather large hand in delaying treatment and possibly contributing to the decrease in odds.

I can probably bet that most Americans have similar stories dealing with health insurance companies.  But, hey—we can all simply Go to the Emergency Room to get that Care!