I was very ill yesterday with a flare up of my auto-immune disorder and spent most of the day in bed. Then last night my wife was taken to the emergency room with chest pain and a fever where it was discovered that she has bronchitis. So I guess I missed all the hullabaloo about the HCR bill passing.
I would still have preferred a public option which would have likely been cheaper than my current crap insurance, but all things considered you take what you can get and hope that it will help people who have lost their health care insurance or may lose their health care insurance.
It’s funny because yesterday while in bed a I received a call from a friend in Canada about the difference in their system versus ours. We discussed a mutual friend in the US with the same severe medical condition from which she suffers (I am withholding info about the specific illness out of respect for their privacy).
Our mutual American friend is uninsured and cannot afford the latest medications for his condition. Instead he must either take decades old generic medications because they are cheaper and the only ones he can afford. These meds have severe and permanently debilitating side effects that are well known. However, without insurance that is all he has available to him. He can take them or choose to forego this grossly inadequate treatment for his condition. He has chosen the latter course and takes no medications rather than risk further damage to his body.
She on the other hand is prescribed the latest medications for the very same chronic illness which are much better and safer. Under the Canadian health care system she incurs no extra cost for receiving the best available medication for her illness.
So celebrate the HCR reform bill, but remember this: we have a very long way to go before we in this country are guaranteed the same level of health care for all that exists in other developed nations. Many of us are still subject to the whims of insurance companies who still often have the right under American law (i.e., ERISA) to deny necessary treatments which your doctor considers the best course of treatment for you so long as those insurance companies are deemed to not have acted arbitrarily and capriciously in denying your claim. The “timely grievance and appeals mechanisms” for health care claim denials in the legislation are not necessarily going to change the review of claims denials in any significant manner because it does not repeal the provisions of ERISA law that allow insurance companies to deny claims based on an arbitrary and capricious standard of review.
We are still far from from obtaining the same health care benefits and rights (unless we can self insure ourselves because we are rich enough to do so, or have insurance plans not subject to ERISA) that other developed countries routinely provide to their citizens. This was a only a very small victory obtained after great effort. Whether it will lead to further victories and even better health care than this bill offers for all Americans is far from certain.
