I read a lot of blogs in my google reader about health care and chronic illness among other things. The blog post below seemed very poignant to me. It was posted on a blog called ‘Surviving Survival‘, the blog of Is Still Here & Still Here Too. They describe themselves as scientist-manager, artists, partners and lovers who first met almost forty years ago and have faced many physical and emotional successes and challenges. They have survived because of each other. Their voice is unique and I encourage you to take the time to visit their website and read more!
xo nora
Chronic Illness in America – Hope Not You
by Surviving Survival on 2010.07.15, under Society
America (The US, or more appropriately, the United States of America) likes to believe itself to be the most advanced civilization of today’s world. While there is much to praise about the nation of our citizenship, the state of its distribution of health care to its citizens is not worthy of praise nor is it what should be expected of one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.
This criticism does not apply to the state of development and existence of health care. With the exception of a few areas where special interest groups have stopped or slowed development or availability of certain procedures for political reasons, the US has one of the world’s very best health care systems.
Where the system totally breaks down is if a person suffers from a chronic illness and is not of extreme personal wealth or lucky enough to be covered by a com pre hen sive insurance plan. This break down is especially true for those individuals whose chronic illness interferes with their ability to work. Such people very often quickly consume what ever savings they may have built up while they have been able to work. Too many Americans hold the false impression that government subsidies like Medicare fully cover such people. Under Medicare, co-payments for individual medications can run as high as thousands of dollars per month. Many pharmaceutical companies offer assis tance to people who require their med ica tions but can not afford to pay for them but often do not offer this assistance to people who are on programs like Medicare.
We are among the lucky. Lucky on many counts. Because we have had access to personal and family funds and have been well insured in the past, we have received state-of-the art care for our health conditions. Because of this, our health is much better than it might otherwise have been. But this could quickly change. While we have a modest amount saved to support retirement at some point in the future, it does not take too much imagination to conceive of scenarios where health conditions would totally deplete these funds. Our current source of financial support is dependent upon a large US corporation. It also does not take much imagination to con ceive of scenarios where this financial support could vanish in the future.
When we think about just how quickly we could move from enjoy ing the benefits of one of the best health care sys tems in the world to being almost totally denied access to that health care sys tem, can we still call it one of the best health care sys tems? No.
A health care SYSTEM must sup port EVERYONE. The US health care sys tem neglects too many to be a good health care sys tem. Time for our society to stop being an exclusionary society.
♦ Is Still Here & Still Here Too
