I am blessed with both Medicare and State of Alaska retiree insurance as a secondary. When I have a health issue, I don’t think twice about going to a clinic or seeing a doctor.
Yesterday I managed to trip and totally mess up my left foot. Not necessarily broken but pretty gross and painful. Thanks to my insurance, I went to a doc this morning (the outside of my left foot was turning purple so it seemed appropriate), then I went for an xray and then I had a prescription filled for pain meds. And it all cost me a whopping total of $11.
I found myself imaging what it would be like without health insurance or with insurance with such a high deductible that it’s like having no insurance unless you run into a real catastrophe. My foot was killing me and I needed help. Without insurance, I would have been one of those people in the ER who didn’t really need to be there but had no other option. And god knows how I would have paid for the meds or the xray. So instead of being able to think, “Hey, I need to see a doc for my foot”, and just taking off to go see one, I’d have to think, “Could it be broken? Can I afford an ER visit to find out? If I pay that bill, how will I pay for the rent or utilities? Maybe I can just limp around in pain and hope it goes away.”
No one in a country as rich as America should have to make the choice between health care and groceries. But for so long as we give tax breaks to the rich and cut federal employee salaries to balance the budget that tax cut generated, we will have people in the great, big, wonderful country for whom good health care will be as distant as it is for someone living in the slums of Calcutta. And that is just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
We have truly become a country of the haves and have nots. And the haves are not sharing so there is no money to provide for the needs of the have nots.
Welcome to Trump’s America. It sucks.