Every year, depending on the source, anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 Americans die from lack of health care. Why do they lack health care? Affordability is the main reason. Insurance is no guarantee of protection. There are premiums, co-pays, and being forced to stay in the network of your insurance company’s approved doctors. See an out-of-network doctor and your bill will skyrocket. Other people simply go without seeing a doctor for fear of getting another bill they can’t afford to pay. Still others ration their medication also to save money.
A young lady had a sinus infection. No insurance. Her applications for Medicaid were ‘caught’ up in a system notorious for red tape. She couldn’t afford to go to a regular doctor. Her condition worsened. She finally went to the emergency room. By then the infection had spread to her brain and she died.
Another lady’s chemotherapy treatment led to cardiac damage. She needed a heart transplant. A hospital committee decided that she couldn’t get the procedure because she didn’t have a secure enough financial plan. They told her to create a Go Fund Me account to raise funds.
So what can people do? What do they do? How do they pay? Credit cards, relatives, or Go Fund Me accounts are the main source of money. Hence, 100 million Americans suffer from medical debt and, under the current ‘system’, that number is sure to keep growing larger and larger. That’s close to one third of the entire population of the country.
So who benefits from this situation? Big Pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies and even hedge funds and private equity companies are all jumping into the for-profit healthcare express train. Supposedly, and probably unsurprisingly considering the level of greed this company has as its official motto, Amazon also wants to jump into the game.
To these people, the ‘masters of mankind’ as it were, it’s just numbers on a balance sheet. It’s a ‘market’. We’re all just commodities, faceless entities to be exploited for profit, dollar signs that just happen to have two arms and legs. The CEO’s, shareholders, investors and whatnot all do very well while the rest of us suffer. CEO pay amounted to $335 million dollars last year. Health insurance companies reported record profits. Meanwhile, out in the real world, lives were ruined. And the bodies stacked up like cordwood.
The solution? Medicare 4 All. Everybody in, nobody out. A government run program that we all pay into. There will be loud and angry cries from the powerful corporate class of “Socialism, Socialism!” Exactly. Precisely. All procedures will be covered. You need knee surgery. It’s yours and you won’t have to pay thousands of dollars to have it done, assuming you have that much money just lying around unused, something only the very wealthy capitalists have at their disposal.
Unlikely that any of us want to go to the doctor.
But think what it would mean to all those millions of people and countless others who are very close to falling into that category of endless pain precarity to go see a doctor without worrying about the bill you have to pay; to not have to worry about paying for your medication or rationing it just to make it last and put off paying that damn bill that you know will find you wherever you go even in death. (Why can I imagine we’re going through that final checkout line and the Grim Reaper is ringing up the sales. He gives you that extra bill to take with you to the grave).
We need Medicare 4 All as soon as possible. Think of all those thousands of lives that would be saved!
Charles Edward Miller lives in Chicago, working as a freelance photographer specializing in photojournalism. He enjoys people, their differences, their passions, the things they do, and he enjoys doing landscapes. Visit cemillerphotography.photoshelter.com or flickr.com/cemillerphotograph to view his work.
