Guaranteed Healthcare

I am an official (dare I say, proud?) member of Casualty of the Day.

I received my health insurance premium renewal  extortion notice.  They've hit me with an 18.5% increase.

My current monthly premium is $629.83 per month, the renewal notice is $746.30. This represents right around an 18-18.5% increase. They expect me to pay $8955.60 a year for junk insurance.

What makes this assault so deadly, is that we are in the midst of a huge recession, wages are declining, people are losing their jobs and of course, their employer-provided health insurance.

I have a vision though. Armies of desperately sick Americans descending on Congressional offices and emergency rooms across America, pleading for medical care. We are heading over a financial cliff and into a healthcare Armageddon. This is not hyperbole, it is reality.

My Congressman, Jerry Nadler, on the other hand, has access to the Federal Employee health Benefits Plan (FEHBP).If he selected the same insurance as I have, he would pay $206.44 per month and the taxpayers would subsidize him to the tune of $314.25.

I urge you to go to this link, click your state and see what your Congressperson is paying and then compare it to what you pay. I'll tell you in advance, you won't like what you find. The sickening unfairness of our Alice in Wonderland political system is breathtaking in the extreme. When will the American people refuse to stop subsidizing these monsters? And by the way, I'm not accusing Nadler of being a monster. He happens to be a co-sponsor of HR676, but I do think he should renounce his taxpayer subsidized health coverage until his constituents receive exactly what he has.

I live in one of the few so-called merciful states. We have community rating in New York. This means the scum for-profit insurers must sell insurance to everyone, even people like me with dreaded pre-existing conditions. The insurance industry and John McCain blames the "so-called uninsurables", people like me, for causing premiums to increase. Shame on me for having a pre-exisiting condition.  John McCain and the insurance industry only wants healthy people to have access to health insurance.

I'm not the only casualty. Our government and the insurance industry feeds on the most vulnerable among us.

Children for example. Do you know about the tragedy playing out in Hawaii under a Republican governor?

Of course families are dropping private coverage. It is unaffordable!

Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

And seniors?

Many senior citizens in the richest  formerly richest country on the planet, stop taking their medications when they hit the awful doughnut hole.

For many older Americans, this is a bitter time of year with a deceptively sweet name: the "doughnut hole."

It's not a treat from the local bakery, but rather a coverage gap in the three-year-old Medicare Part D drug program. When Part D was first designed as a way to help elderly patients pay for their prescription drugs, the only way the federal government could afford it was to impose a yearly limit on what it would cover for each member. So once seniors consume drugs up to that threshold—it is $2,510 in 2008—they fall into the doughnut hole. They then have to pay fully out of pocket for their drugs until the end of the year, or until they're eligible for catastrophic coverage, whichever comes first.

The doughnut hole has been a source of angst ever since Part D began in 2004. Now we know why: One way seniors deal with being in the hole is to stop taking their drugs.

We're facing healthcare Armageddon. For me, I'll face down the rapacious insurance company (I have no choice) and take the path that most Americans are forced into. I'm going to drastically raise my co-pays and deductible to a point where my monthly premium will drop enough to make it nominally "affordable".

It's not affordable. It will never be affordable, until we banish from the face of the earth the parasitic middleman who devours 31% of our precious healthcare dollars.

Even worse, it's not acceptable. It's not acceptable that American citizens now view healthcare as a luxury. It's not acceptable that only the rich can access healthcare.