U.S. healthcare: What if you’re a tourist and got sick? (II)
Insurance companies can also refuse to honor a bill from a hospital because the hospital is not in their “healthcare network,” or because a hospital, though in their “healthcare network,” did not call them prior to admitting and treating a patient that has insurance with them. They also pick and choose what illnesses to cover […]
Insurance companies can also refuse to honor a bill from a hospital because the hospital is not in their “healthcare network,” or because a hospital, though in their “healthcare network,” did not call them prior to admitting and treating a patient that has insurance with them. They also pick and choose what illnesses to cover in the insurance policies. My own policy, for instance, does not cover dental treatment, treatment provided in a government hospital, routine physical examination, etc.
If I have a need for these services, I have to either pay from my pocket or extend my coverage by paying an extra premium. Just three weeks ago, a friend of mine, who is a full-time professor, was diagnosed as having a predisposition to heart attack, so her doctor advised her to go for treatment. But her health insurance does not cover heart surgery and she does not have the kind of money needed to fund a heart surgery. So she is listlessly resigned to fate now.
Insurance companies also typically target young and healthy people (who often have no need to visit hospitals and therefore literally give them free money) and reject old, vulnerable, and illness-prone people who need the most medical help. They are able to make this shifty discrimination because before you sign up for a health insurance policy here, you have to disclose your medical history. They use this disclosure to determine whether or not you will be a future financial burden on them.
I just think that American health insurance companies are a bunch of criminal, rapacious, malevolent, blood-sucking enterprises that no nation should tolerate. They have ensured that although America has the world’s best healthcare facilities and personnel, it has the worst health record among the world’s 16 most industrialized countries, according to a recent survey. And this is so because healthcare has been colonized by these predatory, cold-blooded and crass private sector wolves to the complete exclusion of government.
The Obama administration wants to reverse that by changing the law so that government can also invest in health insurance and compete with the shameless private sectors vultures. Conservative Republicans in the US Congress (who are sponsored to their posts by insurance companies) have derided this as “socialized medicine.” And they have got poor, ignorant people to rise up in violent, vitriolic, race-tinged demonstrations against Obama for this.
However, according to opinion polls, most Americans now want government involvement in health insurance to keep costs down. This is called the “public option.” Insurance companies and their minions in the U.S. Congress are scared shitless at the prospect of this option. Government involvement in health insurance would mean the end of, or at least a substantial check on, insurance companies’ exploitation of people’s misery for profit.
Fox News anchor Shepard Smith captured it well in a recent face-off with Republican Senator John Barrasso when he said, among other things: “Over the last ten years health care costs in America have skyrocketed. Regular folks cannot afford it. So, they tax the system by not getting preventative medicine. They go to the emergency room in the last case and we all wind up paying for it. As the costs have gone up, the insurance industry’s profits, on average, have gone up more than 350%. And it is the insurance companies which have paid, and who have contributed to Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle to the point where now we cannot get what all concerned on Capitol Hill seem to believe and more than 60% of Americans say they would support, which is a public option.”
However, not having health insurance at all is a lot worse than having to contend with the current deformed and immoral system. Over 45,000 people die in America every year because they have no health insurance of any kind. And emergency room bills account for more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in this country. That’s why a Newsweek writer recently described America as “No Country for Sick Men.”
The good thing is that the Obama administration is working very hard to fix this embarrassing mess. So what I advocate for the millions of uninsured Americans is both access to health (which only the current malformed health insurance system can guarantee for now) and the opportunity to benefit from a reformed health insurance, which insurance companies have so far spent over $21 million to either derail, dilute or thwart. But it doesn’t seem like they will succeed this time.