Guaranteed Healthcare

I am a single father and small business owner who has been operating his own company since 2003. While I could afford healthcare for myself and my daughter, I have opted not to get it until I could offer it as a benefit to all my employees. In the time since I started the company, I have watched costs for healthcare rise annually at a rate that puts it just out of reach for us.

At the same time, I have dealt with my own healthcare issues out of pocket and accumulated over $40,000 in medical costs over that time. These have been for relatively mundane things, like a kidney stone, a skin infection, a carbunkle (that affected my daughter) and a root canal. The costs to deal with these issues would not have been a fraction of what they worked out to be were I am able to get access to a private physician who accepts patients without insurance. Each time something has come up, it has been while I was travelling on business, and each time, I was denied access to local physicians because I did not have a pre-existing relationship and did not have insurance. Instead, I was directed to go to emergency rooms to receive basic care, each time at a cost of several thousand dollars.

I cannot be the only one facing this kind of situation. The complications with the current administration of healthcare in America are systemic after a point, where the costs of not participating previously are an obstacle to actually receiving coverage.

I approach health care companies annually to discuss starting a plan, and one of their chief determinants of costs is my own personal health (I am 36 and in fairly good shape). The fact that I have had to go to an emergency room for a kidney stone has been cited as a disqualifying factor with several insurers, and has been used to supress the levels of coverage the company could receive with others.

In other words, there is really no way for me to actually provide coverage for the people working for me, and my recourse seems to be to deal directly with physicians on the off chance they will actually treat me. It's really a nightmare, and something needs to change.