News from the Plains. All this Red can make you Blue
Just a scratch
by Barry Friedman
Comes a story of a boy who may soon be dead.
Nineteen years ago this month, when he was just a little baby, Charles Browne's tiny fingernail scratched his eye, making it bleed bad enough to send him to the hospital.
Browne was born with
cystic fibrosis, a particularly nasty disease that causes a host of ailments from lung problems to digestion.
And here's where it gets complicated.
Thanks to very expensive medication (How expensive? Glad you asked. In a moment), he has managed to live a reasonably normal life--if you count normal as having as an appetizer to every meal you ever eat a handfull of pills.
Which he does.
"I have to take six or seven pills every time I eat, or I won't be able to digest the food," Browne says. "So, three meals a day? Do the math."
The total cost of all that: about $6,000-month--or $72-thousand per year. (But please: tell me again how if we had a system where we gave Browne a voucher of, say, $1500 per year, doctors would fight for his business and lower his costs.)
Luckily, his mom, a housekeeper, qualified for SoonerCare--Medicaid in Oklahoma--which paid for most of it.
(And let me stop to say: good on government.)
And here's where it gets sad.
But then Browne turned 19, and was no longer eligible for the program. He applied for social security and disability benefits, but since he was full-time student, he was denied those.
"If I stayed home and didn't do anything with my life," he said, "they would help me.
"But because I'm trying to get my degree and improve myself, I can't qualify for anything.
"If you're not totally dependent on them, they don't want to help you at all."
Don't you hate people who just take and take from the system and do nothing to improve themselves?
If he lives long enough--which his mother says is a big if--he will be eligible for ACA (that's Obamacare with a sneer), because insurance companies will be required to offer coverage for people with pre-existing conditions--even those whose conditions have been around as long as they have.
That wouldn't have happened before.
And this has nothing to do, at the moment, with Governor Fallin rejecting health care exchanges and Medicaid expansion (though, for the love of God, you'd like to think 200,000 uninsured Oklahomans who could be helped by ACA would trump the standing ovation she'll get from the hundreds of lobbyists and like-minded politicians at the next Koch Brothers Meet N Greet), but it does say something about the hearts and minds of those who decide upon such matters.
For those who believe, as does the Speaker of Oklahoma House of Representatives T.W. Shannon, that healthcare is not the business of government and that competition and choice is the answer, Browne would be at the mercy of the private insurers, which might be fine if he didn't need a furniture dolly just to bring in all his medical records.
An arthritic, incontinent 86-year-old man with gout, Atrial fibrillation, early-onset Alzheimer's, and basal cell carcinoma would have an easier time getting coverage.
Forget for a minute whether it's conscionable for insurance companies to make a profit on your illness (but just for a minute), the government--state and federal--and its insurance safety net kept Charles Browne alive.
Again. Good on them. Most of them.
"Without his pills, my son will die," Gena Browne, his mother, said. "It's not 'might' or 'maybe' or 'probably.' He will die."
Tulsa World
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