“March 27, 2012 - As the Supreme Court considers the
constitutionality of the president's health care law, Senator Corker said the
law is going to drive up health care costs and will have to be replaced with
"common sense" legislation that "fits these times, fits the
American people, allows the freedom and choice that American people are
accustomed to" and is "fiscally sound."
Cassi Creek:
I began
working in a medical laboratory at the age of 14. My exposure to medical care in America began
at an even earlier age. I listened to
the tales my mother brought home from her jobs at local hospitals; and later,
from her stint as a public health nurse.
She leavened these bits of reality with her schooling experiences and
her earliest jobs in rural and small town hospitals.
Hospitals
were for the rich and for the poor. The
rich were provided nice rooms – by the standards of the day – and often had
private duty nursing care independently of the hospital’s staff. The poor were poured into charity wards and
were expected to be grateful for what they received in the way of care. Physicians provided minimal care to charity
patients unless the facility happened to be a teaching hospital. Hospital stays could be lengthy and
expensive.
Medications,
diagnostic procedures, and treatments differed greatly from those of
today. There were no oncology drugs,
surgery and radiation were the only treatments for cancer.
We’ve
advanced tremendously in our ability to
provide health care, to diagnose and treat.
One or two night stays may cost more for today’s patients than a week or
two as an inpatient prior to Medicare.
In those post
WWII days, when science, technology,
engineering, and medicine made immense leaps toward modern medical practices,
we still had a multi-tiered delivery system.
The rich got all they could pay for, the middle class paid for all they
could, and the poor lived and died outside the system unless they could be
admitted to a teaching hospital.
I entered
health care full time in 1968 and worked
in health care, full-time until I was injured on the job in 1998. I then switched between employee and patient
status until 2001. After that, I was no
longer cleared to work and no longer insurable.
My experiences with health insurance companies were highly informative
and highly unsatisfactory.
With the
advent of Medicare, and with the health insurance benefit becoming the goal of
employees, the multi-tiered system became more a two-tiered system. But as the high tech aspects of medicine
became more and more prevalent, and as the standards of practice pushed more
and more doctors into treating the chart instead of the patient, the price of
health care sky-rocketed. And as the
price of care increased the insurance carriers found their selves sitting on a
gold mine. They could add to their
corporate and personal profits by rejecting any applicants but the most healthy
and the most wealthy. They could collect
premiums for decades and then refuse to pay for treatement. They could even buy Senators and Congressmen
to write laws guaranteeing their corporate and private revenue streams by
refusing to review and modernize the delivery of health care in the high-tech, high
quality hospitals of the modern U.S.
We’ve
returned to that two tiered system. We
ration health care by affordability. The
GOP/teavangelists have allowed the health insurance companies to refuse to
insure about 30% of all Americans. That’s
30%, perhaps more, who can’t buy insurance even if they are employed. They fall into the box of patients marked “GET
SICK – DIE QUICK!. How very third world
our health care system has become.
This is the
problem that the Affordable Care Act was intended to eliminate. The hoped for solution was universal
single-payer insurance for all American Citizens. What actually was passed by Congress was
another windfall for the health insurance companies that handed them millions
of new people to expand their pool of healthy insurance consumers.
The GOP has
proposed this solution for decades. Once
Obama’s name appeared at the bottom of the page they wanted nothing to do with
it. Now they want to abolish anything
resembling what most modern nations have enacted.
The solutions
Senator Corker claims the American tax payer will want are not anything at all
to th e benefit of our citizens. What
Corker, Congressman Roe, and the rest of the insurance industry’s pocket puppets
want to foist off on the American citizen is a return to that three-tiered
system where no one gets in without money and no one leaves with any money
left.
To insure
that no patient gets expensive treatment the insurance companies have batteries
of clerks – read that “corporate bureaucrats” whose job is to refuse, reject, delay, and deny the
health care the insured paid for. To
convince the average voter that such practices are justifiable, that the
insurance execs are entitled to millions of dollars in bonuses, they throw up a propaganda smoke
screen about “socialized medicine”
Don’t believe
that insurance companies should be able to take money in premiums and then
refuse treatment for patients? Don’t
think insurance companies should write laws and hand them to Congress to
rubberstamp?
Bob Corker believes in insurance companies rather than
citizens. Park Overall believes that the
citizens of Tennessee and of the United States should have access to real
health insurance and that health care decisions should be made by patients in
concert with the patient’s doctors. I plan to vote for Park Overall for
Senate. You should too!
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