Editorial: Health Insurance Companies Shouldn’t Have the Power to Destroy Lives

Last year, I decided to leave my soul-killing corporate job that I had been staying in solely for the health insurance benefits, to go out on my own as a consultant. I wasn’t downsized or let go. It was fully my choice to leave.

Some of my colleagues called me “brave.” Why? Not because I was leaving a “permanent” salary to go out on my own to a more precarious situation, although that is definitely something to be concerned about. It was all about the health insurance. I was electing to give up a job where my very good (and very expensive) health insurance was generously subsidized by my employer. Yes, some of my colleagues called me “brave,” but I’ll admit that at least one or two others called me “insane.”

I decided to take the COBRA option, at least through the end of the year, while I shopped around for an alternative. At $1600 a month, COBRA was a drain on my finances, but since I have a daughter with a chronic illness, maintaining good health care coverage is important to me.
I have to acknowledge now that maybe my co-workers weren’t entirely wrong about my “bravery,” although it may have been naivete disguised as bravery. I thought I’d have no trouble finding a good and affordable insurance plan on my state’s Health Connector, one of the statewide insurance clearinghouses set up under Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”). Several years ago, I had been able to purchase a nice plan this way when I needed to.
I found, though, that the previous variety of plans and providers was no longer available on the Health Connector. Those that were left were pricey, had high deductibles, and, unless I was willing to pay the amount I had been paying under COBRA, had numerous restrictions.
I ended up purchasing a plan that I’m not entirely happy with, because the premium was the maximum I could comfortably afford each month.
This experience was an acute reminder that in the United States, the reason many people stay in unsatisfying, toxic, or underpaying jobs is that it’s the only way they have access to health insurance. And not all insurance plans are equal in the coverage they provide, the restrictions they have, or the portion of the premium that employees must pay. Even for those who have employer-subsidized health insurance, many will still be at risk of losing everything, should they or a family member have a serious, long, or expensive illness.
We’re told that hospitals will often “work with you” to pay medical bills. Several years ago, I worked in a hospital financial services office. Our patients had to prove that they were practically destitute and had exhausted all other resources before we would “work with them.” Many impoverished people, not to mention those who aren’t destitute but who are still struggling, fall through the cracks.
No one should have to exhaust all of their resources for the sake of their healthcare. No one’s life should be turned upside-down because of healthcare expenses.
It’s no wonder that in a recent Gallup poll (along with numerous other polls), healthcare was the top issue for voters, with 35 percent saying it was extremely important, and 81 percent saying it was “extremely to very important.”
Whether one has insurance through an employer, through a state Health Connector, or through a broker, the cost of treatment and medications (and often, the premium itself) is prohibitive. For those without access to affordable insurance, the cost is impossible. More and more Americans are coming to realize that there but for the grace of God or their employer, go they.
Despite the dearth of great health care options on my state’s Health Connector, I am a staunch supporter of the ACA. For all insurance consumers, not just those using “Obamacare,” it has given us benefits that we have now come to take for granted. It requires that annual checkups be fully covered; prevents insurers from denying us coverage if we have a pre-existing condition (which is important for my family — most families, if we’re honest); provides for a number of previously not well-covered services including those for addiction and mental health care; and requires health insurers to cover prenatal care, among many other benefits that previously, insurers could wiggle out of covering.
Our current president wants to take all of that away. Not because he wants to replace it with a plan that will better serve Americans. Certainly not because he wants more Americans to have access to decent healthcare. He wants to take it away simply because the ACA was Obama’s idea (and was shepherded by Trump’s current rival, Joe Biden). Trump wants to obliterate all things Obama — and we know how Trump feels about Joe Biden, as well.
There is much about the ACA that needs improvement. But it is an important first set of steps toward creating a healthcare system that works for the majority of people, and that could eventually work for all of us. Its guidelines are the best we’ve ever had as far as patient protections, and it’s the best we could hope to have under Donald Trump.
Our health is important, and our healthcare is important. Access to healthcare, however, should not be the force that drives so many of the other major decisions we make about our lives — where we work, how long we stay in an unbearable work situation, how many jobs we have to work, whether we can afford to go to the doctor, and, for many, which other bills to hold off paying in order to pay a medical bill, or even whether to declare bankruptcy.
As more people have experienced or witnessed firsthand what it’s like to have to make life-impacting sacrifices solely for the sake of their healthcare coverage (or because of non-coverage), more and more Americans are coming together on the position that healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
As of Thursday, March 5, the Democratic race for the presidential nominee has been whittled down to two men and one woman. Voters will place their faith in one of these candidates to heal the condition of healthcare in the U.S. Each has a different approach, but Democrat voters have high hopes that one of them will free us from the power that the private health insurance industry has to destroy our lives.

Sanders: The current healthcare system is ‘pathetic’ | CNN [2020-03-02]

Wall Street Focuses on Health Care in Election | Bloomberg Politics
[2020-03-03]

Editorial: Is Bernie Sanders Trump’s Alter-Ego?

In recent weeks, many Americans have posited that Bernie Sanders is the liberal alter ego of Donald Trump. Both are loud and irascible, and both talk of big (some would say “grandiose”) ideas. They both have cult-like followers, and they are both Washington outsiders. Different, yet alike.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes, …”Their styles are similar: shouting and unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking boogeymen (the “1 percent” and CEOs in Sanders’s case, instead of immigrants and minorities), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past.”

Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, is the political opposite of Donald Trump, who has hitched his wagon to an ultraconservative evangelical base. Yet, for their respective supporters, each holds the promise of a similar type of revolution; one that will “explode the status quo.”

Trump brags of leading “a movement the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Sanders talks of a revolution that will result from “the most unprecedented campaign in the modern history of this country.”

And though each man’s base interprets “hope” differently, both men have a message that appeals to the hope of a similar mindset, at least on the surface: Blue collar workers, mostly white, who are disillusioned, tired of falling through the cracks, and weary of a system they think is rigged against them. Their base supporters see these figures, older white men though they are, as outsiders who have their backs, and who came to challenge the system and set it right. (“Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”)

Both have bases that include extremist supporters who are loud, often abrasive, fanatical, and unconditionally loyal to their respective movements in similar ways. Black-and-white absolutes define and categorize the world into good people and bad people; smart people and stupid people. Villains and victims.

“…Sanders is a populist of the left as surely as Trump is a populist of the right, with a familiar distaste for compromise and a comparable appeal to Americans outraged or disgusted by politics as usual and by the usual politicians,” writes Frank Bruni of the New York Times.

Sanders offers hope in “Medicare for All” while Trump ridicules the idea, signing legislation that gives financial protections to the multi-million-dollar commercial health insurance industry. Where Sanders warns about climate change, Trump has rolled back environment-friendly legislation. Sanders refuses to take funding from Wall Street billionaires as Trump cozies up to them. Sanders wants stricter gun control laws, and Trump promises, “unlike the Democrats, we’ll never take your guns away!”

To say that Sanders and Trump are just opposite sides of the same coin, though, is to not consider a key difference between the two. Our president has bluffed and cheated his way through his presidency, and through his life, making up impressive statistics about his accomplishments, putting himself above the law (and tweeting about it), petulantly supporting corrupt practices and people (such as his recent grants of clemency to 11 of his friends and associates who were all convicted of federal crimes), and practicing corruption himself (for which he was recently impeached).

For all of his bravado and bluster, Bernie Sanders, unlike Trump, is not a cheating businessman, a vindictive employer, a briber of porn actresses, or a sycophant of Putin. And for all of his pie-in-the sky ideas, Bernie Sanders, unlike “alter-ego” Trump, talks about his vision in terms of “you” and “we” and “us,” while alter-ego Trump seeks to magnify only “I” and “me.”

Can Bernie Sanders Defeat Trump? Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara & The Atlantic’s David Frum Debate | Democracy Now! [2020-02-04]

BERNIE SANDERS to Trump: ‘You are a liar, you are a fraud’ | The Hill
[2020-02-18]