Day: January 29, 2013

Oh yeah, I’m the wrong color for that…

I’m a little pissed off.

I’m at the end of COBRA coverage which I maintained because I was once again trying to do the right thing.

That belief cost me $10, 872 and forced me to keep using a pharmacy provider called Express Scripts which is without doubt one of the worst organizations I’ve ever had the misfortune to deal with.

I’m an average person,  I pay my bills, don’t expect to be taken care of, pay my own way, try to stay off the government radar, and try like hell to live my life my way without having someone else’s hand in my fucking pocket or up my ass.

I’m still laboring under the illusion that doing the right thing is important… at least to me.

Because of that philosophy, I’d applied for a personal healthcare policy to the same fucking insurance company that currently has kept me insured under a group policy for the past 6 years. Not only couldn’t they simply look at the information they already have about me…

After due consideration… they declined to cover me on a personal policy.

Let me get this straight… You’ve been covering me, You’ve made almost 11K off me over the past 2 years, and now I’m too big a risk? Jesus, Mary, & Joseph!

It makes me believe even more strongly that all health insurance companies should be ruled illegal and their executives and most of their staff should be taken and whipped naked through the streets.

This places me in a situation that I’d anticipated anyway.

I can apparently qualify for HIPAA coverage which is obscenely expensive. I’ve been told it costs something like almost double what I’ve been paying under COBRA.

Sorry, I can’t afford that kind of money, seeing as I’m unemployed and all. 

This is one of the reasons that I was not a supporter of Obamacare and the obscene price tag that will cost.

If you look at the price of the HIPAA program you can’t come to any conclusion other than a national healthcare program will be horrifically expensive.

I suspect this is what the politicians concluded as well, hence the provision to make  anyone not paying for health insurance a criminal…

The Tea Party and Republicans are wrong about the Death panels… It’s much simpler than that.

All Obamacare has to do is price people on fixed income or who have no income out of the market. No boards or panels needed…

I was hoping for something better in healthcare reform. But Obamacare was shoved down our throats.

I thought a plan that forced the insurance companies to provide coverage for the people who had previously been covered by their employers, would be more efficient. A plan like that wouldn’t require implementation of yet another bureaucracy.

If you had a group policy with your employer and you got laid off you were still automatically covered… And that coverage would continue no matter what. The payments could have been based on a sliding scale.

If you couldn’t pay because your unemployment ran out or you took a part time job at substantially lower pay… It wouldn’t have mattered you were still covered.

There are people who’ll say yes but what about the poor? What about the young just coming into the workforce?

Simple… the poor pay like they always have (or not… depending on the culture they come from). The young, are automatically and without question covered on their parents policies until they get a job that provides insurance.

Using a plan like this, everyone is covered, the insurance companies aren’t able to weasel out of providing coverage that all of us have paid for many times over.

As an added benefit,  the Medical insurance / establishment has a real incentive to keep costs low and increase the efficiency of the system.

Why does it cost $25 for a fucking aspirin in a hospital? Because of all the bullshit it takes to get you that aspirin. Even though you could go to the hospital gift shop and buy a whole bottle yourself for $8.

Then when you think about the people who retire because they were in their 50s or 60s and got laid off.

Through no fault of their own, they get fucked again and again by a system that they’d been told all their lives was supposed to reward them for their years of contribution.

Instead they’re on unemployment, paying obscene amounts for COBRA, hitting their 401Ks and having to pay endless penalties. But then, to add insult to injury their COBRA runs out and they’re uninsured when they need coverage the most.

Poof, in just a matter of months their dreams of retirement are destroyed.

This kind of stuff is exactly why there are so very many angry disenfranchised people in this country. 

Honestly, it’s a wonder that there aren’t more people losing it. 

This is how people end up eating cat food. Or homeless pushing shopping carts down the sidewalks. 

It’s not just the medical establishment… it’s the entire system that’s broken in an unbelievable number of ways. Throwing trillions of dollars at it isn’t going to make it any better.

The solution is to fix the problem.