Fair health care now a privilege

By Stephanie Tames

We finally reached the yearly family deductible for our health insurance this month, and I felt an unaccountable urge to celebrate.

“Oh boy,” I said to my husband, “now we get to have all those tests and labs we’ve avoided.” I felt like a beneficent ruler doling out gifts to my subjects.

To my husband I give a long-awaited dermatologist visit. To my daughter, let’s see about that foot problem. To my son, hmmm. What should I give him? He really didn’t need anything.

None of us had to go to the doctor as a matter of life or death. Yet reaching that magic deductible number I felt giddy, happy, relieved. Insurance would finally kick in.

Until Dec. 31, we wouldn’t have to worry about medical costs, except of course co-payments and co-insurance. For the first time since Jan. 1 of this year, and with only four months left in 2009, I felt protected.

It didn’t take long for the irony to sink in.

The country is in the midst of a bitter debate on health care reform and here I was looking at my deductible like it was an invitation to a party. I suddenly felt as if I had stepped into an Orwellian other world. Nothing made sense.

And that’s precisely the problem. Our health care system, including insurers and drug makers and the lobbying empire that has built up around the whole mess, has become unwieldy, self-serving and mired in the muck of profits and politics, duplicity and double-speak.

I even had an insurance claim representative apologize to me recently for not understanding the fine print of my policy! If they can’t figure it out, how is anybody else supposed to?

But what disturbs me most is the language of my fellow consumers — those people who are speaking out against health care reform, who use words like socialism and death panels to scare and divide.

The rhetoric at town-hall meetings, more staged than spontaneous, makes me think they’ve all caught Joe the Plumber syndrome: Don’t look at the big picture of how something like, say, taxes or health care or any social system helps the whole country, it’s all about me, me, me.

At a recent Cobb County forum with Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) one woman summed up this attitude succinctly: “It’s just not fair to everybody,” she said. “It’s not fair to those who work hard and seek employment with a company that offers health care. I don’t think that just because you wake up in the morning that gives you the right to health care. It’s a privilege.”

I’m not complaining about my health insurance. I’m happy to have it. I guess I’m lucky that my husband worked hard and sought an employer who offered insurance.

For seven years I worked for his employer, too, but was classified as a temporary worker. I had to take four weeks off every 12 months. As a temporary worker, they weren’t required to give me health insurance — or any other kind of benefit.

I’m also happy that both of my brothers have woken up every morning for 60 and 51 one years, respectively. I hope they wake up every morning for many more years.

But right now when they do, it is with the hard knowledge that for the health insurance industry their identical congenital heart defects are deemed risky and premiums set so high as to make insurance for them unaffordable. We all hope to stay healthy; for my brothers even routine care is unthinkable.

And something is wrong with a system designed to provide protection that nevertheless leaves you feeling vulnerable and subject to the fine print of exclusions and exceptions.

And that deductible, co-payments and co-insurance of mine didn’t do anything to discourage my doctor from ordering unnecessary tests and procedures. It just discouraged me from seeking health care in the first place.

Privilege? What’s a privilege is to live in a wealthy and progressive country that can and should devise a system of health care and insurance that promotes health, is fair, and affordable for everyone, that doesn’t encourage excessive profits and isn’t influenced by lobbyists and malpractice lawyers. That makes sense.

Stephanie Tames, a writer, lives in Statesboro.