First and foremost, I am a mom and wife. I have mommy worries everyday just like most moms. My daugher is my life and I worry about healthcare a lot. In fact, I agonize over it. What if she gets really sick and we can’t afford her healthcare. We have PCIP insurance through Obamacare, but that ends in January. It is not a great policy, but it is all we got. We pay about $445 a month for individual plans. We both have $2,000 deductibles and $25 office doctor visit copays. We have a $500 deductible of generic meds and $750 for non generic.
PCIP is what it is. A poorly planned, stop-gap program to help folks like me who lost insurance when they left their jobs. Like others on the plan, I couldn’t get new insurance because the insurance companies turned me down because of a “pre-existing condition.”
I put my daughter on the plan too. Insurance companies were refusing to write children only policies in my state at the time. It was beneficial timing that I got her on the PCIP plan. In September 2011, my daughter had to have her appendix removed. The emergency surgery took place at our area hospital which happens to be out of network so we had to pay the 60 percent which added up to $6,700. I appealed and lost. PCIP, which is supposedly government sponsored, did not care that I had to rush her to my local hospital less than 3 miles away because she was dying. It didn’t matter that I saved them money. Our regional hospital charges almost two times as much for the same surgery, but they are in network. PCIP would have had to pay them more than what my area hospital charged.
I am bitter about the healthcare debate in America. This year, the government contracted with United Healthcare to oversee the PCIP network. I am not against folks earning a decent wage but the head of United Healthcare is listed by Forbes as the 8th highest paid CEO in the nation:
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2012/12/ceo-compensation-12_Stephen-J-Hemsley_NBHE.html
He makes 48.3 million dollars a year.
Meanwhile, my benefits have decreased this year. We still have to pay out $2,000 each before our now 70/30 split kicks in. It was 80/20. My premium went up from $250 to $307 because I turned 46.
The program will be gone in 2014. What will happen next? I am not hopeful about the situation. I feel like those of us with pre-existing conditions are healthcare martrys. Instead of helping the average person, the healthcare industry is lining the pockets of CEO’s. Our government has made a contract with lovers of money and greed. They want to profit off the sick by denying life-saving healthcare to sick people.
Read this article at Time Business and Money to see what I mean: http://business.time.com/2010/11/10/5-health-care-stories-thatll-make-you-sick/
Here is another article on the issue that will make you sad:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/health-care-for-all/speaking-of-health-care
I do not believe health insurance companies have the goal of gee lets make sure all our clients can afford our premiums and make sure they get the medicine they need. No, it is about profit, plain and simple.
President Obama and the Democratic Congress gave too much power to an already wicked and uncaring system. It is depressing. The chief executive officers of major health insurance companies are becoming billionaires at our expense. We have no choice but to pay their outrages premiums and next year we really will not have a choice! They will get richer and the quality of our healthcare will only diminish.
I do not trust the healthcare insurance industry to do right by Americans. Before the affordability act, health insurance officials raised their premiums to ridiculous levels, denied insurance to those who needed it most, and dropped the insurance of sick people so that they would not have to pay legitimate claims. To think that on January 2014 that health insurance industry leaders are going to start caring about our health and not their own pocketbooks is looney. The only answer is to make healthcare about health and wellness of Americans. It should not be a profit industry, period. We need a public option.
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