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We're a medical family. My father is a doctor, I've been to quite a few doctors and hospitals, and my mother has acted as patient advocate for all four of my grandparents.
Recently, my mom's uncle needed surgery. His primary doctor was... not encouraging. (Luckily, Mom made sure he got a second opinion.)
I don't want to give out too much specific information about someone else's personal health, so forgive me if I'm vague. The thing is.. His recovery was a close call. And the hospital, based on the broad strokes of his advanced directive (aka "living will"), had marked him with a "Do Not Resuscitate" order.
Luckily, Mom was there. She found out that there were measures he would want taken in the short term to aid his recovery. And she found out something else: the hospital had a longer form, with an exhaustive checklist of measures to take or not take, available upon request to be filled out with the help of a doctor. For my great uncle, that form very nearly became a literal matter of life and death.
She should have known about it. And not just because of her experience. (But it's telling that, despite that experience, even she wasn't aware of it.)
She should have known because there was supposed to be a Federal program to make it easier for people to know about that form, to teach them about what it meant, and to encourage doctors to take the time to go through the process of filling it out with any patients who so desired. It was referred to, as it long has been, as "end of life counseling" or an "advance care planning consultation".
That program was (for lack of a better term) killed. Before it ever went into effect. It was killed by someone with no Federal authority. By someone who had once advocated for just such a thing (and therefore has no excuse for not knowing any better). And it was done with just two words.
The program that nearly meant my great uncle's life was removed from the recent health care bill because Sarah Palin pointed at it and screamed "Death Panels!"
It was a lie. A huge partisan whopper. In her time as governor of Alaska, she'd advocated for just such a program on a state level. She knew what it was about. And she chose to forget that and begin this hysterical campaign against "government death panels."
The claim was debunked over and over, but it managed to take root. It was retold over and over, by her and by others on the Right. People who should have known better but who found in it a compelling and effective scare tactic, something that could drive the masses and derail the real debate. (Media Maters has an overview of the history.) I was upset about it before, in a general sense. Just another baseless partisan tactic. Another lie told for political expediency. This month, it came home for me. A direct hit on my family.
The thing is that our current system does have the imagined death panels. All the worst evils told about "Obamacare" (actually Congress's "Affordable Health Care Act") already exist. There are people who get between you and your doctor. People who decided whether or not it's worth paying for needed medication and/or treatment. People who have a definite vested interest in finding ever more creative and difficult ways to say "no." They work at insurance companies.
Health reform was supposed to help fix that, among other things. But it didn't get that chance. The bill that got passed (which politicians and commentators on the Right are still lying about) was a watered-down half-measure. A patch. An improvement, generally, but one that doesn't go nearly far enough to save us from the mess we're already in.
I could rant on about the evils of insurance companies. How they squeeze out doctors, how they rig the system in their favor in so many ways big and small, how they hurt and kill patients... But you've heard it all. (Well, maybe not all of it. Maybe not things like how they paid off politicians - of both parties - to make it a Federal crime for a doctor to so much as tell another doctor how much he or she gets reimbursed for giving a patient a flu shot, because doctors shouldn't have anything that even smells like collective bargaining rights...) If you live here, you've lived it. Dealt with the red tape and the deliberate mismanagement and the endless frustration.
And the heck of it?
Look, I'm not a well man. Getting ready to do my taxes, I was totaling up my medical expenses for the year. I spent over $10k on prescriptions. (It's not cheap being diabetic, and that's only the tip of my metaphorical iceberg.) Insurance reimbursed me for about $4k of that. It also saved me some money on office visits and such, though I didn't add that up. In all, my medical expenses for the year came to over $20k. (Down a bit from the year before, though I expect 2011 will be back up.) Guess what the number one expense was. Insurance premiums.
This is in New Jersey, which already has tight restrictions on insurance companies. We require that at least 80% of the money an insurance company takes in must be paid out in patient benefits. We require that insurance companies charge everyone the same amount for the same plan. We even write the plans for them, so that they can't use vague and weasely provisions. We do just about everything that was in the bill that passed, and we've done it for years.
Yet here I am, paying over $12k a year in premiums. Here I am, messed up as I am, with all the medical expenses I have, and well over 50% of the money I pay in health care costs goes to premiums. Here I am, and they're taking in twice as much money from me as they're paying out on my behalf.
We need better than this.
We were on the right track, but it got ripped apart. Redefined and shouted down. Even the parts we should have all been able to agree on. Even the parts which were built off of Republican proposals.
And along the way, Sarah Palin very nearly killed my great uncle.
Recently, my mom's uncle needed surgery. His primary doctor was... not encouraging. (Luckily, Mom made sure he got a second opinion.)
I don't want to give out too much specific information about someone else's personal health, so forgive me if I'm vague. The thing is.. His recovery was a close call. And the hospital, based on the broad strokes of his advanced directive (aka "living will"), had marked him with a "Do Not Resuscitate" order.
Luckily, Mom was there. She found out that there were measures he would want taken in the short term to aid his recovery. And she found out something else: the hospital had a longer form, with an exhaustive checklist of measures to take or not take, available upon request to be filled out with the help of a doctor. For my great uncle, that form very nearly became a literal matter of life and death.
She should have known about it. And not just because of her experience. (But it's telling that, despite that experience, even she wasn't aware of it.)
She should have known because there was supposed to be a Federal program to make it easier for people to know about that form, to teach them about what it meant, and to encourage doctors to take the time to go through the process of filling it out with any patients who so desired. It was referred to, as it long has been, as "end of life counseling" or an "advance care planning consultation".
That program was (for lack of a better term) killed. Before it ever went into effect. It was killed by someone with no Federal authority. By someone who had once advocated for just such a thing (and therefore has no excuse for not knowing any better). And it was done with just two words.
The program that nearly meant my great uncle's life was removed from the recent health care bill because Sarah Palin pointed at it and screamed "Death Panels!"
It was a lie. A huge partisan whopper. In her time as governor of Alaska, she'd advocated for just such a program on a state level. She knew what it was about. And she chose to forget that and begin this hysterical campaign against "government death panels."
The claim was debunked over and over, but it managed to take root. It was retold over and over, by her and by others on the Right. People who should have known better but who found in it a compelling and effective scare tactic, something that could drive the masses and derail the real debate. (Media Maters has an overview of the history.) I was upset about it before, in a general sense. Just another baseless partisan tactic. Another lie told for political expediency. This month, it came home for me. A direct hit on my family.
The thing is that our current system does have the imagined death panels. All the worst evils told about "Obamacare" (actually Congress's "Affordable Health Care Act") already exist. There are people who get between you and your doctor. People who decided whether or not it's worth paying for needed medication and/or treatment. People who have a definite vested interest in finding ever more creative and difficult ways to say "no." They work at insurance companies.
Health reform was supposed to help fix that, among other things. But it didn't get that chance. The bill that got passed (which politicians and commentators on the Right are still lying about) was a watered-down half-measure. A patch. An improvement, generally, but one that doesn't go nearly far enough to save us from the mess we're already in.
I could rant on about the evils of insurance companies. How they squeeze out doctors, how they rig the system in their favor in so many ways big and small, how they hurt and kill patients... But you've heard it all. (Well, maybe not all of it. Maybe not things like how they paid off politicians - of both parties - to make it a Federal crime for a doctor to so much as tell another doctor how much he or she gets reimbursed for giving a patient a flu shot, because doctors shouldn't have anything that even smells like collective bargaining rights...) If you live here, you've lived it. Dealt with the red tape and the deliberate mismanagement and the endless frustration.
And the heck of it?
Look, I'm not a well man. Getting ready to do my taxes, I was totaling up my medical expenses for the year. I spent over $10k on prescriptions. (It's not cheap being diabetic, and that's only the tip of my metaphorical iceberg.) Insurance reimbursed me for about $4k of that. It also saved me some money on office visits and such, though I didn't add that up. In all, my medical expenses for the year came to over $20k. (Down a bit from the year before, though I expect 2011 will be back up.) Guess what the number one expense was. Insurance premiums.
This is in New Jersey, which already has tight restrictions on insurance companies. We require that at least 80% of the money an insurance company takes in must be paid out in patient benefits. We require that insurance companies charge everyone the same amount for the same plan. We even write the plans for them, so that they can't use vague and weasely provisions. We do just about everything that was in the bill that passed, and we've done it for years.
Yet here I am, paying over $12k a year in premiums. Here I am, messed up as I am, with all the medical expenses I have, and well over 50% of the money I pay in health care costs goes to premiums. Here I am, and they're taking in twice as much money from me as they're paying out on my behalf.
We need better than this.
We were on the right track, but it got ripped apart. Redefined and shouted down. Even the parts we should have all been able to agree on. Even the parts which were built off of Republican proposals.
And along the way, Sarah Palin very nearly killed my great uncle.
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From:
no subject
I've had sooo much trouble with insurance for my boyfriend. (I myself don't have the money to pay for it while I'm unemployed.) What makes me mad is when he says it is Obama care messing up his insurance. All I can do is shake my head and think, "No it is the Republicans who have cut funding for the things in TN that have caused it. They got everyone scared and cut back on it."
Tennessee had TN Care which was state mandated health care. But it has been slowly been torn apart after people realized it was "socialism!" Just really horrible to see. :(
From:
no subject
Sorry you're having so much trouble over there, too. It's just a mess. Thing is that most of the health reform bill has yet to kick in. A quick net search pulls up this timeline. So you can show your boyfriend just what's happened already and what's coming down the pike. There's plenty more info over at HealthCare.gov.
As for "socalism!" ... *sigh*