I don’t have insurance. I ended up having the worst pain in my entire life all because of bread. I have a high pain tolerance and never yell, let alone scream. I was screa-ming. Falling off the hospital bed in pain, couldn’t walk. During one visit, they tried to numb my intestines and it didn’t work. Anyway, I remember being put in a room. . .and while I was screaming and in pain, they sat right outside laughing and watching football. I waited for help for four hours or more while they had a good time in front of the TV. When the pain finally subsided, I got up and managed to walk out. Just for sitting in that room without seeing one doctor’s face, I was billed hundreds of dollars.

I had to diagnose myself and still can’t pinpoint exactly what is wrong. I just know to stay away from bread.

They also mentioned college being free in other countries. I was rejected for financial aid and I’m below poverty level. My life is now very unfulfilling and I am very stuck.

I feel abandoned and left behind. And it’s angering. It’s even worse that nobody does anything about it. They accept it like puppets. And continue to live for “me” instead of “we.”

Here are some local SiCKO reviews from last Friday’s showing:
• Cathy McCaughan
• Doug McCaughan
• Tommy’s blog (Cathy and Doug’s son)
• Sarah’s blog (Cathy and Doug’s daughter)
• Whites Creek Steve
• Russ McBee
&bull…

Health Care is good if you can
afford it…and none of us can afford it without insurance.

Rather than changing our Health Care lets just fix the insurance problem and have the government pick up the tab for those who can’t afford it?

————
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/348604.html?thread=4754876#t4754876

joxn wrote: My point is this, of course: the basic healthcare that everyone needs to stay alive and healthy is not something which an insurance policy is designed to handle. Insurance policies are for rare but statistically definable events. But basic healthcare is not rare — although it is statistically definable: everyone will have to have it, and in the case of preventive care, they’ll have to use it for it to be beneficial.

We need a government-run healthcare system that has a broadly-defined level of basic healthcare, and then tiered levels of healthcare where the defined quality of service tapers off. The top tiers of the QoS pyramid should be exactly the kinds of things that insurance policies are well-suited to; and private insurance companies can come in and make their profit selling policies on those tiers to scared rich people.
——————————

Interesting, eh? Maybe insurance is the wrong paradigm for routine health events like childbirth. Maybe mutual-aid is a better model (like jimmy stewart explained to his savings and load *MEMBERS* during the bank run in ‘it’s a wonderful life’)

I’m Canadian, and I cannot really fully appreciate your situation. I just cannot wrap my head around the idea of a ‘basic’, as you say, health event having any kind of major or lasting impact on my finances in any way… It’s not within the realm of my experience.

However, the things I read about how Americans feel about their insurance makes it seem to me that policy holders like you *cannot* be the actual *customers* of the US private health insurance industry. These companies are doing well, so their customers must be satisfied.

Policy-holders can’t be the *customers* of this industry, because, as Moore points out, providing service to policy holders is a *drain* on insurers - fundamentally and structurally in contradiction with the profit motive. So insurance companies are not in the business of serving them. They can’t be, due to the economic structure of it all.

The customers of US private health-insurance companies can only be investors. Insurance companies must be like resource companies (mining, timber, hydroelectric) and policy holders are the fields they mine. Insurance companies are in the business of extracting as much profit from this resource-bed as they can (without *technically* committing fraud), and this extraction rate is the product they sell to their customers on the stock exchange. That extraction rate is what their customers buy.

This certainly seems consistent with what we hear about life down there!

The constantly and incomprehensibly boggling thing from an outsider’s point of view is the rhetoric of the US right that this private system is moral *because* it is private… Hunh?! Furthermore, using social institutions to manage mutually pooled resources for mutual aid is immoral. Reciprocal altruism as a basis for defining social institutions is… immoral, unpatriotic, even Satanic!

I wish things were better for you all. You are the richest national economy ever in the history of our species, and there is no reason for you all to be struggling like this. You aren’t asked to pave your own roads!! Dig your own sewers!! The government establishes basic conditions for the market to function, besides roads, courts of law, policing etc., why shouldn’t that include a healthy and well-education workforce, as part of the baseline support the government provides so that entrepreneurs can take all that for granted and build from there?