Hi, Wendell. I don't know if you'll read this, but I feel like writing it today, so follow me over the flip.
I saw your exchange with Michael Moore (one of my personal heroes since back in the days of Roger and Me) on Countdown and I read your thank-you diary yesterday. I even commented - "You're welcome." I didn't feel I had much else to say on the subject, but I wanted to be among those who acknowledged what you wrote.
I find that I want to say something else to you.
I'm having a really, really tough year. I am unemployed. My 80-year-old mother has ALS - diagnosed 11 months ago - and is deteriorating rapidly. I moved 1500 miles from my home to live with her and take care of her (hence the no job part). It's a miserable situation on any number of levels, and one that will not have a happy ending.
I have no health insurance myself, what with having no job. I would like to have seen the public option passed, so that people like me would have access to some kind of insurance and health care, but due in large part to the efforts of insurance companies like CIGNA, and the efforts of the Republicans those insurance companies donate to, and the complete lack of spine on the part of our Democratic "leaders" -- well, the public option didn't happen. Better luck next time, I guess. (Ha.) In the meantime I have been limping around for a month on an injured foot, treating it as best as I can with ibuprofen and ice packs. I can't afford to go to a doctor to have it treated. Some days it hurts less than others.
My mother has Medicare. Actually, she has one of those Medicare Advantage plans offered by AARP. She joined it long before she began exhibiting symptoms of ALS. The HMO she joined has no providers who know anything about ALS or how to help her -- it took them two years to figure out what was wrong with her, that's how clueless they are about this disease. Another healthcare system in this city does have an ALS treatment center, but it took four months of me fighting the insurance company after she was diagnosed, to get a referral authorized for her to be seen there -- four months of time during which her condition deteriorated at a near-catastrophic rate. The position taken by her HMO was, basically, "We can't help you but we'll be damned if we'll let anyone else help you either." I had to appeal all the way up the chain to CMS/Maximus to get her seen by an ALS specialist.
Health "care" in this country is a joke. Even when you can find it, can you actually get access to it? Maybe, if you have exactly the right insurance plan and if you don't have any pre-existing conditions and if you meet all those other little fine-print criteria that are specifically designed to prevent you from getting care. I'm a far-left, socialist kinda gal, and not the biggest fan of capitalism in general, but when it comes to an industry that maximizes profit at the expense of human lives, well, I am zero-tolerance. I hate the insurance industry with the heat of a thousand burning suns. I can't even call it a "necessary" evil. It's just evil.
I don't sound very grateful yet, do I?
Okay, so here's the thank-you part. Today is Thanksgiving. I'm seriously having a very hard time finding anything to be grateful for today. My life is pretty much in shambles. My mother is profoundly disabled by her disease and she's completely miserable at being so completely helpless. She takes her misery out on me, because I'm the one who's here. It all just sucks out loud.
But I sat down at my computer a short while ago, while my mother is taking her morning nap, and I decided to re-read your diary again. And I actually felt, as I read it, just the tiniest glimmer of something that feels a little like gratitude, or something like it. It's nice to know that there is someone out there, someone who was a part of the insurance industry and complicit in the horrible acts that industry commits for the sake of preserving and maximizing its profits, who managed to connect with their conscience and their humanity and who decided to do the right thing rather than the expedient thing. That's just not something you see much of these days.
So for that, thanks. I hope you continue to speak out against the wrongs committed by the insurance industry. I hope you keep on trying to make a difference.
Happy Thanksgiving.