Spirituality & Adversity with a Healthcare Emphasis: III

I expect to catch up on comments to the previous thread by Tuesday...

Our health insurance corporations don’t have to deal with the aftermath of denying health care to people they’ve never met that’s been ordered by their physicians – in my particular case, by leading experts in their field of medicine. The aftermath can include incapacitation or death, as with the couple who spoke to the New Hampshire State Legislature just ahead of me who’d lost their four year old son after their insurance fought them on the meds he needed. By the time he got them it was too late.

I’m “lucky” in a way to be able to give the account that follows. There’s no way of knowing, but my guess is that patients and families who go through something like this are usually too devastated and overwhelmed by dealing with their adverse circumstances to bring their situations to light, especially since the “legal remedies” often touted by the industry as making health care reform unnecessary – “patients always have the right to sue” – turns out to be another example of misinformation propagated by American Healthcare Inc. to preserve their numerous opportunities for enhancing their bottom line at the expense of those patients who, in market terms, are more trouble than they’re worth.

Currently I’m going through other problems with the system that are as outrageous as anything I’m describing in these posts. But it’s tough enough to live with them. I can’t write about them at the same time because it brings almost all my time under their domination. I find it less oppressive to write about what’s already been done.

Forced Experimentation: Watching my condition rapidly deteriorate without treatment and unable to afford what had been prescribed, I took half of what remained of my life savings and spent it on an unconventional, similar sounding but less expensive treatment not covered by my policy because it was considered experimental. It sure was; I was permanently injured by it. Cost: $5,500 dollars for three weeks that produced permanent contractures in my left paraspinals.

Partially Unglued: Anxiety and helplessness over my health and finances created major problems with insomnia. I had spent several years at tremendous personal effort and expense making what appeared to be a slow recovery. Watching myself backslide and the years of work come undone, I felt abandoned. For months I slept two to four hours a night – sometimes five or six, sometimes zero. Twice I blacked out behind the wheel of my car and had to figure out where I was when I came to. I developed significant short term memory problems and became incoherent over the phone to the point that a family member came to stay with me.

When I was in grad school for my counseling degree I’d read about “panic attacks”. They’re not well understood; as I recall a genetic predisposition is thought to be involved. They’re genuine physiological attacks and not to be confused with feeling emotionally “panicky.” They come on abruptly and include symptoms such as rapid heart rate, dizziness, and trembling to the point where people often think they’re having a heart attack.

I’d never had one nor had anyone in my family. But it turned out that this level of sleep deprivation and stress brought them on. I was barely able to continue working.

Insurance Refugee: After getting a grip on the sleep with the aid of a minor tranquilizer that finally worked for me, I had to launch an all-out job hunt to obtain new insurance if I ever wanted treatment again. It turned out that my employer's insurance also covered all the related employers in my area. I was forced to seek work out of state and relocate in declining health, uncertain that I would be able to make the transition in these circumstances.

Have you or anyone you’ve known ever become “partially unglued” from major health problems combined with no access to care or other forms of severe adversity? How did you get through? Ironically, mental health care is one of the areas where insurance coverage is typically skimpy to non existent.

For further info on our health care situation generally and more on my story in particular see
http://www.hmoappeals.com/.

Spirituality & Adversity with a Healthcare Emphasis: II

Stigma Health Care

The movie Sicko’s made the headlines; I’ve lived the life. With presidential campaigning underway and health care a subject on people’s minds, what follows is a real-life illustration of the sort of thing that can go badly. It’s one of many personal illustrations that I could draw upon from my past thirteen-plus years of progressive illness/progressive disillusionment with our health care system.

But this is much more than personal. I had what anyone would regard as an excellent group plan from a major insurance corporation. And the policy language that was used to block my access to care is standard, boilerplate insurance contract language.

Early in the course of my disease, I appeared to be slowly recovering from something that years later it would turn out I didn’t have. At the time, however, my case presented as a widespread or “diffuse” case of Myofascial Pain Syndrome – a rare condition affecting the muscles.

That’s when my insurance – let’s call them “Stigma Health Care” – permanently terminated coverage for the one treatment that appeared to be contributing toward my recovery. The doctor attempting to prescribe treatment was one of the world’s leading authorities on MPS . Stigma’s own preferred provider in my local area had also written to Stigma with increasing outrage over their denial of benefits.

More Clause, Less Santa

In the end, after a year and a half of struggle, all efforts proved futile. It turned out that my insurance policy contained the clause quoted below. Later, when I got new insurance, I found that my new policy contained almost the same language word for word. I’d say the health insurance industry has a pretty effective lobby in Washington:

"The fact that a physician may prescribe, order, recommend, or approve a service or treatment is not sufficient for such service or treatment to be considered medically necessary by the Medical Director."

A bureaucrat who had never set eyes on me decided that my further treatment was not “medically necessary” – the form letters simply kept deploying that phrase again and again without so much as pretending to engage with the reasoning of my doctors. I received the final letter permanently terminating my benefit on Christmas Eve or Christmas day; I no longer recall which, but distinctly remember the sense of holiday surprise that came to me and my family that year. The clause allowed Stigma to legally overrule the combined efforts of their own local physician specializing in musculoskeletal disease; the major health care advocacy reform organization in my state; efforts at mediation by the NEA; and the orders of a doctor to whom people from literally around the world travel to be treated for MPS.

Stigma didn’t negotiate because Stigma didn’t need to.

Next Up: Initial effects of my “Stigmatization”: “Partially Unglued…”

Spirituality & Adversity with a Healthcare Emphasis: I

Sometimes life tests us severely. In fact it cracks or prematurely kills off many of us.

Some of this pressure is unavoidable. Much more of it is caused or compounded by the actions and the failure to act on the part of human beings. Our troubles are largely of our own making.

I’m letting the poem below, which takes off from recent events in the news, serve as a brief introduction to a series of posts on the trouble the human race causes itself – with a particular emphasis on the evaporation of care from American healthcare-inc. over recent decades.

Consider it an open thread. Feel free to comment on the state of health care in the US, another country, or on a personal experience in this area. Feel equally free to comment on other topics that the poem points to or suggests for you, or on the poem itself.

Upcoming posts will have a tighter focus on health care.

Lazy Days

A child’s maimed playing with a cluster bomb;
An old man’s found face down in the dirt;
A woman hands her daughter
Some contaminated water
Because it’s all there is to drink;
A buried miner’s cursing goes unheard.
Hearts die every day, betrayed and hardened.
Around the world, the way
That many take is clear: greed pays.

Some live in luxury;
They feel the need and have the means;
Some die in poverty –
Most with needs no less luxuriant
But lacking the financial ease.
Our youth, uneducated,
Kill each other in the blighted streets
Where the privileged will never stray
And safely can ignore – much like the elderly,
The housebound, and the bedridden,
Making do with every desultory scrap
That market-driven healthcare
Decides it can afford.

Still, the planet we’ve inherited
Orbits promising long ages,
Favored by a star that’s near enough
But not too far. The river currents and the air
Stray only where we’ve built the dams
And damned the wind; safe to say,
Our grief has not been caused
By fields or leaves, by elephants or trees
Or massive failure of the moon and tides.

The Bible says God made us in his image
Then rested on the seventh day.
God meant his sketch to show us working;
We’ve fleshed it out to paint ourselves
The image of a god on holiday.

- Paul Maurice Martin

Big Picture God

God Resigns as Micromanager

From Susie Q at Susie Q’s Place http://nanasrocker.blogspot.com/ - her comment to my “God Willing” post:

"I don't think God's will involves a detailed blueprint for our lives. Perhaps God is goal oriented in a very broad sense and leaves the action plans up to us as individuals.”

To me it seems that whether God is viewed as Other or as All, either way a “big picture” God, so to speak, looks more realistic than God as micromanager. Our world certainly doesn’t look like the enactment of a plan that was laid out in detail ahead of time. It has strong elements of spontaneity, adaptation, and chance.

I’m inclined to think that if people who view God as the micromanager of our lives were to examine their perspective on this closely, they might find more motivation than reason behind their point of view. If so, the motive could be worthwhile to consider. It’s a perspective that puts them at risk for terrible disappointment or outrage if they or a loved one should suffer the kind of terrible misfortune that can potentially happen to any of us as contingent beings.

God Gets Personal – Or Impersonal

I’d add that a Big Picture God is consistent with viewing God as a personal, caring Deity as well as with understanding God as All. Christianity’s traditional understanding of Jesus is an example. God the Father allows the person of Jesus to suffer and die precisely for the sake of the big picture. The fact that God lets this take place isn’t taken to indicate that the Father didn’t personally care for Jesus as a human being.

That said, it happens that citing this particular example for present purposes raises what might be taken as a paradox or problem concerning the manner in which the New Testament portrays the unfolding of the events involved with Jesus’ life and death.

God as Other or God as All?

Lots of interesting comments last thread. Thought I’d abridge a couple of them as a good way to approach the subject of two different ideas of what God is.

Pauline at Writing Down the Words http://prophetswords.blogspot.com/ wrote:

"Sometimes I think I want to believe in a God but . . . my mind simply cannot accept the idea of a deity."

Don at Poetic Alchemist http://poeticalchemist.wordpress.com/ wrote:

"God is all . . . If we see ourselves as separate from God, then we face the alignment problem; is our choice consistent with the will of God? If we see ourselves one with God, the alignment problem disappears."

What Pauline cites as not making sense to her is the idea of God as Other: the existence of a Creator distinct from creation, a supernatural divine Entity. Don speaks to another perspective on God: God as comprising being or reality itself. From this perspective, certain contradictions/paradoxes that come with viewing God as Other don’t arise.

I’ve deliberately framed Original Faith (the book) in terms that allow readers to hold either of these perspectives or an alternative belief system – or a non-belief system, including atheism and agnosticism. The book sets aside matters of belief to focus on direct experience, identity transformation, and our potential to lead lives that contribute to the larger world in our own ways.

From what I can see, the things we hold in common are of potentially greater significance than the differences in our belief systems – if enough of us were to awaken to them.

God Willing. . .

Is everything that happens the will of God? If so, how can we tell it’s that and not just “stuff happening,” since much of what happens in life appears to be random and accidental?

If everything that happens is not God’s will, then how does anyone or anything ever manage to get around the power of the will of God?

And on what scale does God’s will operate? In the Bible, it’s at the level of history – the movements of armies and peoples, divine interventions coming along at critical moments…

God of History. . . And God of Grocery Shopping?

Today, to gauge by how people talk, it seems to operate on a much more personal level. I don’t hear many people claim that George Bush’s “preemptive war” on Iraq was God’s will; that God was present in a special way at the Bay of Pigs or Watergate; or that God had anything in particular to do with Monica Lewinski’s internship and its repercussions for the Clinton presidency. Yet survivors of car accidents and plane crashes often claim that their personal survival was God’s will. If a loved one recovers or fails to recover from alcoholism or drug addiction, that’s God’s will. Will an upcoming surgery go well? Will I get that job I just interviewed for? God willing…

I don’t know how far this can be taken. Recently someone picked up some milk for me that was spoiled even though it wasn’t past the expiration date yet…

I’d sure like to think that God has better things to do than pick who’s going to get the curdled half gallon at Acme Thursday morning.

To me, God’s will is a meaningful idea that gets at something real; conundrums arise from perspectives on this idea that are unrealistic in some respects.

Spiritual Tranquility

Disquietude is always vanity, because it serves no good. Yes, even if the whole world were thrown into confusion and all things in it, disquietude on that account would be vanity.

--St. John of the Cross

Is it always true that disquietude is vanity? Sometimes or mostly true? Are there distinctions to be made or are all forms of disquietude equally unwarranted?