Spiritual Adversity & Health Care Post Script

I wouldn’t have posted a series on this subject if I thought the personal story I included was a rare hiccup in a well-run health care system. “HMO horror story” has become a cliché over the last couple decades because people around the nation have similar experiences every day.

With the federal government abdicating responsibility, individuals and families who’ve been run over by their health insurance companies and still have the will, energy, and health left to protest usually have to settle for doing what they can to help push health care reform at the state level. But state politicians are heavily lobbied by the insurance industry too. And so it goes. . .

Incidentally, they should really be called “Health Insurance Horror Stories.” When mine was covered by the New Hampshire media, I noticed that they referred to it as an HMO horror story; however, I was paying premiums for my employer’s best plan and never did belong to an HMO. Most importantly, these stories are just one aspect of widespread and systemic failures in American health care, some of which I’ve summarized at http://www.hmoappeals.com/.

All That Glitters. . .

Rolling forward into mind almost all the time now,
A past denied its future climbs back into view.
I lie and watch it surge to spot the old and new.
Vagaries: the smile, half-hidden, of a third-grade girl
From long ago; a granite stone, half-buried in the dirt
Below a porch; a dream of bicycling and glimpse of lake
That’s shadowed nearly black with island shade.
I’m on the road again, but feel I’m being undermined.

Another surge. A wide arm of the ocean nears,
Inviting swift descent. Outside, the rain forgets its patter.
When it stops, a child’s outcry, mild and at play.
The outcry comes again and sweetly bends,
This time just to hear itself I think,
A child that stands inside a seeming field of solid ground in time.
My stricken mind just streams:
A river finger-thin to fall back toward the rollers climbing in,
Dimpling the low tide’s hard-packed glitter.

Paul Martin

. . . Are the Golden Toenails

It will be four years in December since I’ve been able to leave the house; I’m semi bedridden and without access to relevant health care. Too fragile for safe transport and with adaptive needs too unique for an institutional setting, no specialist will come to my residence. One exception: the podiatrist who comes once a month to cut my toenails.

There’s a good market for that specialty. I’m only fifty, but this is a service often needed by the elderly.

If you don't count the toenails, a case like mine, admittedly rare, is too much time and bother under an insurance-dominated medical system that is market-driven to the point of not simply profiting but profiteering at the direct expense of the financial and physical well-being of US citizens. There’s no financial incentive to serve someone like me; there’s no danger in neglecting someone like me. Choose your illness wisely.

Yet the same goes for cases that are not at all rare: for example, the millions of uninsured, underinsured, and retirees from employment of every sort who today are increasingly likely to lose the health benefits that came with their jobs as their former employers try to cope with ever rising health insurance premiums.

I hope people will include health care on the short list of issues they view as important at election time.