<shenmei9wise@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:0300b9af-e2cb-4122-bc5a-36dca131b698@b5g2000pri.googlegroups.com...
On Apr 3, 7:38 am, spodosaurus <spodosaurus@_yahoo_.com> wrote:

I am with you on this, Ari.  I have literally seen people die in this
country from lack of good health care who have had insurance.  The
stress of trying to come up with the required almost 2000.00 a month
to pay for my insurance is horrifyingly unhealthy.  Any of us who have
HMO's are probably getting substandard care.  We do not have the
highest standard of healthcare in the world-we used to when I was a
kid and is you had insurance, your doctor decided what you needed.  My
two long-term relationships have been with men who are brilliant
doctors and my best friend is a doctor.They all every day think about
quitting medicine because they can't give the best care to their
patients.  Michael actually has left medicine in this country to work
full time for DWB/MSF because he could not in good conscience,
continue working in the US in a system that not only didn't work for
poor people-it doesn't work for many many middle class people .I spent
thousands of dollars last year on my daughter's healthcare because she
was with Kaiser.  I finally just bit the bullet and paid for health
care.  That took almost all of the money I had saved for any type of
retirement.  She, by the way, is now on Medi-Cal, having gotten SSDI
first try in just three months-she was that sick.  She is getting a
much better quality of care through Medi-Cal which will become Medi-
care in two years and should be even better.  SIDE NOTE:  It is just
fascinating to read the responses people had to the medicare system
when it was first proposed.  It was called a communist plot by many
people and it was commonly thought that it would ruin the quality of
health care in the US.  Strangely enough, geriatrics health care is
one of the few places where the US is not at the bottom of the pile
among the industrial world.

I have so many friends who are European who get great quality of
health care.  Sometimes it is laborious and can take several  months
to get to a specialist for non-emergency care but for emergency care,
I have heard very few complaints. I have a friend who is an Australian
writer who flew back to Perth when she was diagnosed with breast
cancer because she felt her quality of care would be better (she  is
now almost three years cancer free, by the way).  This is not just one
story:  it includes my friend liam who flew home to Ireland to get
treatment for prostate cancer even though as a visiting professor, he
was insured through UCSF.  He felt like his quality of care would be
better.  I have a friend who has arthritis and is Swedish-She is on
ABT (antibiotic therapy) and is doing great.  She teaches a Cornell
and has health insurance but goes back to Sweden every three months to
get a series of IV's and her oral antibiotics.  She says it is much
less hassle than trying to negotiate the HMO system she would have
access to.   Conversely, I have a friend who teaches at Mcgill  and
loves the Canadian health care system although she says is varies
greatly from province to province.

What we have now is not working-it doesn't work for me, it didn't work
for my daughter, it didn't work for the 17 year old girl who was
denied a transplant by CIGNA and died.  The list is endless and it is
not only the poor who but the middle class who are stressed beyond
belief as they try to pay for health care.  I have been doing nothing
but struggling with health care for the last two years.  First Pac
Advanage pulled out of California living 200,000 of us uncovered and
small agencies scrambling for health care. Then it was my horrifying
stint at Kaiser which so inferior as medical care that I should have
saved the money; now it is  the CIGNA rates that are almost 2000.00 a
month (hum...homeless of insured?) .

I used to spend my days doing real things like debriefing  Katrina
first responders, doing medical care for the homeless and working with
HIV health care, doing trauma workshops for first responders and
children right after 9-11, doing millions of projects with the kids
(blanket project, soup kitchen project, on and on), and even doing
things for ASA (postcard project, secret sender projects,).  The
health care system in this country has literally made me so self
absorbed as i try to scramble for money to pay my own insurance after
having spent thousands upon thousands on my daughter's health care,
that there is nothing left for others.

I am seriously,as I write, packing things in this wonderful house
which I can no longer afford, and beginning to search for housing in
Oregon and Hawaii  because i can get at least affordable health
insurance in these states.

I am not an anomaly.   I have this same conversation with people every
day.  OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IS NOT WORKING.

m

i concur.  i've got bs/bc traditional coverage and that's considered very
good coverage in this state.  but, i've been told by two of my own doctors,
that even with really good medical coverage, medicine is indeed being
rationed in our country -- rationed by the doctors who are pressured by
insurers to ration testing, treatments and time spent on each patient to
keep their, the insurers, payouts down.  don't think for one moment that
your medical care is being decided upon by your doctors who actually know
what you need.  the quality of your medical care in this nation is being
decided and dictated by medical insurance companies.  as for HMOs, all of
the doctors i've seen over the years (even my doctors at kaiser and group
health--both of which are HMOs) consider them "group death organizations"
(their words, not mine).

kate

and i want to add, the scope of employee medical insurance coverage is not
only dictated by insurers to doctors, but also by the companies who purchase
the coverage from insurers for their employees.  these companies negotiate
with insurers what will and will not be covered to limit the companies'
costs; and those company generated limitations on our medical care get
dictated to doctors through the insurers.  so it seems "our bodies are owned
by the company store", so to speak.

kate

An off topic question for you Kelly. Where in the Willamette Valley
are you? DH and I spent six years in Monroe, on Hwy 99W between Eugene
and Corvallis. We really liked it there but needed the money that DH
gets from working full time in Silicon Valley, CA.
--
BettyB  --  www.flamingo-code.com
"I have noticed even people who claim everything is
predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it,
look before they cross the road." - Stephen Hawking