Health Care In America

This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart because my wife has had two pituitary tumors, thyroid cancer, and a whole host of health issues associated with those circumstances. At one point, we were a relatively wealthy family. How quickly the tables turn when serious health issues rear their ugly heads.

I have been hoping for some kind of meaningful reform to American healthcare for decades. After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to keep my wife alive, it occurs to me that something needs to change.

In the most financially prosperous nation on the globe, it shouldn’t cost $20,000 if you break your arm. It’s the weirdest system in the world. If I can’t pay a bill, eventually a hospital writes it off, ruins my credit, and then the bill is passed on to the American taxpayer anyway.

This is why I always wonder why people are so offended at the idea of there being any form of socialized medicine in the United States. We already have it. The only thing that no one seems to pay attention to is that GoFundMe and tax write-offs are funding more American healthcare than any health insurance plan.

This feeds the healthcare industry’s unilateral power to offset bad debts by charging insane amounts of money for what every other civilized not third-world nation is giving their citizens for “free”. I put that word in quotes because everyone knows that it isn’t actually free, but Tylenol doesn’t cost $200 per pill either, but hospitals are frequently charging that much and more.

You’ve got a whole lot of Republican minded people out there in the present day that will tell you that the United States has the greatest health care system in the world. We may very well have some of the greatest and best educated physicians in the world, but we most certainly do not have the greatest healthcare system.

Every single American without a vast amount of wealth is at risk of losing their life savings should they have a major health issue, even with what most would consider excellent health insurance.

I understand the argument that the government should play little to no role in the healthcare of its citizens, but I think that is very regressive thinking with an ever-growing populace.

The truth is that a very high percentage of Americans do not get seek out any kind of preventive medical care precisely because they can not afford it…which leads to major health conditions forcing them into hospital stays that they can not afford…which end up being funded by the American taxpayer anyway.

So how do we solve this? Clearly, something needs to change. The current system doesn’t work. Penalizing people for not having health insurance has proven only to increase the burden on the average American, and still not providing anything resembling the kind of healthcare that people actually need.

My wife was a healthy, active, 30 year old when her first pituitary tumor changed our lives forever. We had no idea what we were in for when we first got the diagnosis. Between multiple intrastate trips, advanced testing, and a specialist so advanced that getting an appointment with him would have usually taken months, the bills piled up so fast that we could not evene keep up with them.

Our savings disappeared so fast it made our heads spin. I don’t regret getting her the care that she needed at the time, but man, did it do an absolute number on us financially, emotionally, and frankly spiritually.

An argument could be made that she would have just died if we lived in Canada, while waiting for availability. Maybe so, but I don’t think we are really thinking with our heads when we bring up those examples.

Yes, in countries that have socialized medicine, getting an appointment for routine care is difficult unless it is an emergency, and even then, it can sometimes be a chore. But here’s the part that people forget: the same thing is happening for the average American in the modern age not because of the lack of doctors, but because of the lack of funds to pay for appointments.

It would be really nice if our fucking federal government would stop bickering about who should be impeached and which senile 80 year old is best positioned to be sworn into the presidency, and they actually started talking about solutions that help the American people.

The Republican party seems to think that nothing needs to change as it pertains to American healthcare, and Democrats seem to think that every cost associated with living needs to be paid for by the government. Neither of those are true, and the bickering just keeps us all at a standstill with no change, no forward motion, and no progress while Americans clambor for some sense of normalcy from which to build.

I don’t know what the solution is to the healthcare crisis we are currently enduring, but status quo isn’t working, and this has to be addressed. We just passed a multi-trillion dollar Omnibus bill, and it has served to do next to nothing to actually address things that affect real Americans every day. Why is this not important to anyone?