calherewecome

So yesterday, I went to party for the Assistance League folks here in San Pedro. My job was tending bar. That’s a good place to get to know and talk to people.

I was talking to the husband (let’s call him Jim for the sake of the story) of one of Paula’s friends. He asked me to tell him about my cancer surgery and treatment. I told him about discovering a lump on my throat and having it seen by quickly by my Primary Care Doc. A week later I saw the surgeon. He did a needle biopsy on the growth. Surgeon says “inconclusive”. That’s a way of saying there are a lot of false negatives in the test.

So he schedules me for surgery a week later on Good Friday. I go through all of the pre-op testing and check in on Friday. Surgery went fine and I went home on Saturday. Then showed up at Easter Sunday services with a big white bandage on my neck. If you recall, Easter fell on April 1 this year.

Then I had appointment with the radiation oncologist. I had already planned a trip to Boston in May. Start treatment after I got back. Six weeks. X-Rays ended on July 6. That’s done and I am healing well.

Now back to the story. Jim told me that his daughter (26 years old) has a similar lump on her throat. Jim has been trying to get her to get it removed. The problem is that Jim’s daughter lost her health insurance because she had been laid off from her job. The $64,000 question is how does she/he pay for it? She might get it paid by COBRA insurance if she still had the coverage. I suggested that he look into “gofundme.com” as a possible funding source.

If she lived in Canada or the UK or Australia, this wouldn’t be a problem. You see those countries all have socialized medicine, which we in this country have been calling “Single Payer” or “Medicare for all”. That’s because the word “socialized” has a nasty stigma attached to it in this country.

I was lucky enough to have Medicare coverage as well as my private retirement coverage. I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to pay for it. I just had to worry about the outcome. I just had to pay the co-pays.

So Jim is worrying that his daughter might die because they will not be able to afford to pay for her care. One should not have to go to gofundme get healthcare. That is just wrong.

Senator Bernie Sanders and other Democrats have been urging our government to provide “Medicare for all” to the people of this country.

With Donald Trump in the White House and GOP in control of the US Congress, providing this care will never happen. They will be happy to let people die who cannot afford for their health care.

There will be an election coming up on November 6. We can’t vote Trump out of office yet, but we can vote out the GOP. Please VOTE out the GOP on Nov 6.

Thanks,

Joe

This entry was posted on September 23, 2018 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Health-Care, Medical, Politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Medicare, Single-Payer