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Seniors:
Good Health Care Isn’t in Your Future If you’re a senior, your health is threatened! From disease? No. From trauma? No. It’s threatened by just about every institution that claims to be interested in "health care." The only person who’s really concerned about whether you live or die is your doctor, and he or she has been abused beyond measure by our "system" of health care. Consider your friend, the insurance company, which sometimes likes to call itself a "health maintenance organization." You may be aware that Kaiser would prefer not to serve you in this community. Humana and United Health Group currently plan to drop 6.5 million Medicare recipients to whom they provide supplemental benefits. The nasty Federal government doesn’t seem to pay them enough. Now, say you’re in the 60-64 age range and would like some regular old health insurance. Try HealthNet. That’s my company, since it absorbed Foundation Health. My premiums have gone from $60 to $161 in two years, while the deductible INCREASED from $2000 to $5000. For you and your spouse in Nevada County, you’ll pay a tidy $408 per month. Do they "redline" you? Of course. If you and your mate lived in Santa Barbara, you’d pay $290 per month for the same coverage. There’s no point in even starting about denied services. You’ve heard the stories, and may recall that it took a national controversy to allow a woman to stay three days in a hospital after delivery by Caesarian. And can you believe the Ann Landers column that appeared last week in The Union? There was a letter about a boy who lost his hearing because of HMO denials, and Ann (missing the point entirely) told the father, "Insurance companies are business institutions, not charities." Tell that to the deaf child. Consider your good friend, the government. First and foremost, you can’t get medications on Medicare, even though our country is in its 20th year of unequalled prosperity! Can’t we afford it? The best the Republicans can do is pass a tepid little bill for an insurance-based plan. Are they influenced by the $3,339,531 in soft money the insurance industry has given them for this election cycle? To be equally unfair, insurers have also given the Democrats $1,662,475. The point is, as we age we acquire a large collection of vital prescription drugs in our medicine chests. And they’re effective, if we can afford them. But you absolutely do not want to be one of those "stories" on CNN where the poor soul has to choose between spending his or her Social Security check on either drugs or food! So maybe the pharmaceutical companies have your best interest at heart. Give me a break. They whine forever about "research" making drugs expensive, while raising the prices of long-established drugs. Further, they spend $8 billion a year to market to you. Those silly ads in Reader’s Digest and on TV have to be paid for somehow. In the meantime, watch Representatives Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn on C-SPAN, talking about "re-importing" drugs (where you buy a drug in another country and bring in back into the US). One example: Priosec will cost you $119.00 in this country and $17.60 in Mexico! Same company, same manufacturing facility. So go figure. Are we suckers or what? The worst of your elected representatives oppose a person’s right to sue his or her HMO. They expect you to believe that this is in your best interest, to prevent the evil trial lawyers from making money and causing premiums to go up. Sad to report to you Republicans that the Patients’ Bill of Rights was sponsored by Democratic Senator Daschle on 1/19/99 and had 31 co-sponsors, almost all Democrats. How any of you can support Republicans is beyond me -- and I say this to my 78-year-old dad, an ardent lifelong Republican. Remember that bad old "national health" plan that Bill Clinton floated in 1992? Critics said it would give us rationed care, with denial of service, excessive costs and no personal doctors. As bad as anything Lenin or Stalin could cook up. Yeah, except now, thanks to the miracle of the free market, that’s exactly what we have. Except guys like Stephen Wiggins, Chairman and CEO of Oxford Health Plans, makes $30,735,09 a year for doing it to us. Stay well. You can’t afford not to. Barry Schoenborn is a technical writer, and a 12-year resident of Nevada County. His column appears the second Saturday of the month. barry@wvswrite.com is his e-mail address. The opinions of columnists are not necessarily those of The Union. |