Getting closer
We got the official approval to use Daffin Park in Savannah in the mail yesterday. I’m excited and I’m scared, and I miss Mike so much. I know he would have loved all this attention, although none of this would be happening if he had lived.
The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt was in town yesterday and I got to cover the press conference. He was touting technology as the solution to the health care crisis. Just connect all the hsopitals and doctors on a single network so people’s records are more available. Medical errors go down, quality goes up and costs fall.
While that’s true, it’s not enough.
I asked him for an estimate on how many of the 47 million uninsured would get access to quality care as a result of all this, and he said that all this would bring the costs down.
But it won’t make a $6,000 colonoscopy affordable for a student who’s putting himself through college by waiting tables. It won’t make a $300 mammogram affordable to a single mother who’s working at a retail store.
As Scott Rogers, a friend of mine who runs a free medical clinic said, “If it’s over $30, my people can’t afford it.”
I don’t want to hear about costs coming down because of the free market. I already know it’s a lie. Competition was supposed to spur lower costs and better care for people with mental illnesses in North Carolina when they privatzed the mental health system five years ago. All the free market has done is shut people out. People are dying while they wait for care. They’re living on the street because they’ve lost their homes and they can’t get care. They wind up in the emergency room and in jail — exactly where they don’t belong.
The free market doesn’t want anything to do with really sick people. It wants people that will increase its bottom line, and those are people who don’t get really sick
There are exceptions. There are for-profit companies that do a great job (Dan Zorn at Families Together here in Asheville does a remarkable job, but he can’t expand to cover the whole state.) But they’re not the majority.
Health care shouldn’t be in the hands of for-profit businesses. Sorry, Dan.
Every time I hear a government official say the free market will offer people choice and that will drive the price down, I run for cover and wait for the collapse of whatever system they’re talking about.
Look at what deregulation of the banks has gotten us – a mortgage crisis that threatens to send the entire country into a tailspin, a power grid that hasn’t been updated in 30 years and could totally collapse, skyrocketing prices for home cable, jobs moving overseas and leaving American unemployed and uninsured.
I was talking to a woman yesterday who owns her own construction business. She had health insurance, but it didn’t cover anything. It covered a couple of things that came to about a third the price she was paying for the policy, so she cancelled it. Every time she wanted coverage, there was some reason the procedure, the medication or the test wasn’t covered.
The free market doesn’t work for sick people. Insurance companies refuse to help the people who need it the most.
Here in Asheville, there isn’t an anesthesiologist or a gastroenterologist on my insurance plan, so only 50 percent of a colonoscopy is covered. That means I pay over $2,000. When I had carpel tunnel surgery on my right hand, I paid $900 out-of-pocket.
When you sign a contract with an insurance company, you’re the only one who’s held to anything.
I’m so damn tired of hearing how this tweak or that little adjustment will make healthcare more affordable.
More affordable for whom? Certainly not everyday working people.
It’s time to fix this damn mess, and no matter who’s elected, we do have the power to hold his feet to the fire and demand something real be done to fix this.
200,000 people have died in the last eight years because they couldn’t afford health care.
One of them was my beloved son. I would rather have died myself.
Tags: Patient Pals & Family Friends
Life o' Mike has a peer support program for people with one or more serious or chronic medical issues or disabilities.
We aim to reduce isolation and fear among people who have conditions, including psychiatric illness, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, mild dementia or other cognitive disorder or disability, thereby reducing depression and complications as people learn to improve self-management of their medical conditions.
Patient Pals help alleviate feelings of isolation and frustration. They can help people develop a list of questions to ask the doctor and then accompany the person to the doctor to make sure all the questions are answered, taking notes to be sure the person understands the doctor’s answers.
Our trained volunteers also accompany their “Pals” to art exhibits, movies and walks outdoors, meet for coffee, call to check in and more.
Our Pals have experienced weight loss, improvement in diabetes, HIV, psoriasis, depression and more, just because they have someone who cares about them. Some relationships develop into longer-term friendships; other Pals move on to more independent lives.
Family Friends are there to help caregivers and other family members grow into their new role.
We need volunteers, who are asked to donate a minimum of one hour a week. Training is free and includes information on active listening, ways to help and when to know more help is needed.
And of course, we need funding.
To learn more, call Leslie Boyd at 828-243-6712 or e-mail lifeomike@gmail.com.
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