Posted by Damozel | Paying off existing medical bills are just one more burden for the backs of working families already endangered by the worsening economy:
The proportion of working-age Americans who have medical bill problems or who are paying off medical debt climbed from 34 percent to 41 percent between 2005 and 2007, bringing the total to 72 million, according to recent survey findings from The Commonwealth Fund. In addition, 7 million adults age 65 and over also had problems paying medical bills, for a total of 79 million adults with medical bill problems or medical debt....
The report finds that in 2007, nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults under age 65, or 116 million people, had medical bill problems or debt, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time, or were underinsuredinsured but had high out-of-pocket medical expenses or deductibles relative to income.....
"We are seeing a perfect storm of negative economic trends threatening working families in the United States," said Sara Collins, Commonwealth Fund Assistant Vice President, and the study's lead author.... (Bio-Medical Report; emphasis added)
Well then, working families, you had better stop getting sick then, yeah? Because there's no safety net at all....
....or you could vote for Obama, who at least has the flexibility to let the data in. According to Washington Wire (via Teddy Partridge at FDL):
“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall style meeting on the economy.
A single-payer system would eliminate private insurance companies and put a Medicare-like system into place where the government pays all health-care bills with tax dollars.
Many liberals have long embraced the coverage plan, saying it would cover everyone, take the profit out of health insurance and allow for greater efficiencies. But Republicans cringe at such deep government involvement in the private sector, calling it socialized medicine. And many Democrats, including Obama and former rival Hillary Clinton, have taken a much more moderate approach....(Washington Wire) .
He's not quite there yet, of course. As usual, he favors a nuanced, gradual approach. All righty then. As I've said before, Obama is essentially a pragmatist rather than a progressive or ideologue. But this shows a willingness to grapple with the problem.
But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”
“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.” (Washington Wire)
Teddy Partridge comments that this issue is the one the Dems need to start talking about.
Democrats need to talk about [the 72% of Americans who are struggling to pay medical bills] when the topic is our broken health care system, as well as the forty-six million who lack health insurance. Americans understand struggling with bills and debt; for people who have jobs with health insurance, going without it sounds like something only poor people do...Americans need to juggle their medical debt with necessities:....Having health insurance doesn't protect Americans from accumulating medical debt....Having a job doesn't get you health insurance in America.
And of course, private health insurance doesn't guarantee anything, since the companies hate like hell having to pay out large sums: Cf. our own WMD's accounts of her struggles with a certain well-known insurance company when she got the news she had a serious illness.
WMD had substantial grounds for the "blues", if you know what I mean:
Upon diagnosis, I was referred to a gastroenterologist who prescribed the only treatment available: injectable interferon (pegintron) and ribaviron (rebetol) pills. This FDA approved chemotherapy was proven successful and was the best hope of a cure. It required patients to endure 48 weeks of treatment and a long list of side effects. And it was very expensive.
The only other option was to do nothing, allow the virus to ravage my liver to the point of failure, and pray I could find a liver donor in time.
The responsible choice was to begin chemotherapy immediately while I was still young and healthy. Despite its $25,000+ cost, we were comforted by the fact that we were covered by one of the best health insurance companies in America..
Or so we thought. [More....]
You know, Dems really do need to spend more time on the issue of health care and illness, illness being sooner or later as certain as death and taxes. Those evangelical Christians from Saddleback may not care, but poor working class people across America, including some Republicans, are apparently struggling with this burden....
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