Thank you to all who have shared your personal stories and you have my sympathies with what has happened to your families. I hadn’t intended on updating this blog but it seems that the current political climate has made these issues particularly timely.
I posted this story for my wife. This is her accounting of what happened to her mother just last year. She had gone so many rounds with AARP reps on the phone and in writing and got no answers but plenty of excuses and double talk. In the end there was simply no one to talk to. No one to simply listen to how someone suffered and died as the result of red tape and insurance company greed. We were just left with nothing. The only thing I could think to do was to try to share our story with others in the only way I could think of.
Clearly, we are not alone. Others of you have had the same or similar experiences. Why? Because insurance companies have been allowed to operate unchecked for far too long. Sure, they will cover some small, inexpensive medical needs, but when you really need the insurance they find or fabricate some reason why they can’t help you. What kind of insurance is that? The only thing I want from insurance is for them to be there when the big, terrible, and expensive things happen. Isn’t that what “insurance” means in the first place? But little by little these companies have turned farther and farther from the business of helping people and toward the business of bilking people… and we’ve let them do it by not standing up for one another. Now is the time to make these companies actually do what they are supposed to do by supporting health insurance reform.
I don’t know if the current proposals in Washington will create the “ideal” system, but at the very least it is the first real way to start to hold these insurance companies accountable to those they insure as opposed to their stock holders. Having a public health insurance option will create new competition, reduce costs, and require insurance companies to either help their customers or lose them. Think about our system of both public and private colleges and universities. There are good public options, and there are good private options. Having more groups in the education market gives people a wide range of choices and forces all of them to provide better service to their customers. The public option didn’t destroy the private schools, in fact it forced them to adapt and evolve into better programs. At the same time, the quality of education in public universities is also excellent.
Maybe this is simplistic and maybe you’re opposed to it for some sort of political ideological reason. That’s fine. The fact is that we can do better in the world of health insurance and we as a people deserve better.
There is one final thing I’d like to say about the politics involved here. I’m going to quote this because it’s my original saying and I think it’s a pretty good one. “The greatest trick that government has played on the people is creating a two party system. It keeps the people arguing amongst themselves about being Democrats or Republicans so we spend more time infighting instead of actually fighting for our government to actually represent us.” That’s a Nathan Moon original right there, and you can take that to the bank.
AARP insurance is a scam 