This may take a few posts because I don't want to do a big information dump. But with the recent debates over the government shutdown and healthcare (the President's Affordable Care Act) I thought I'd share some of my personal experiences to balance out some of the misconceptions that some folk may have about being both uninsured and insured in the U.S.
To begin with, like many 20 somethings in the U.S. today, my kid's father and I were uninsured when we were first married and having our first two children. We were both working, healthy and not making much money (barely enough to pay basic bills and buy food) and the result was that we could not afford healthcare. When I became pregnant I went to the county and applied for help and discovered that we made so little that the prenatal was pretty much covered by Medicaid. My healthcare in general wasn't covered but I was glad to find that the babies births were covered so that we didn't have outrageous medical bills after the babies were born.
The process wasn't a fun one however. In order to prove that you weren't trying to rip off the system, you had to tell them how much you paid each month for every little thing, including toiletries like tampons, toilet paper, etc. And when you're making $1200 a month and living in a city like Denver it's hard to imagine that you could afford to buy anything other than the barest of necessities so itemizing just seemed like a slap in the face. But I sucked it up and we did get healthcare for that little period of time from the federal government. I won't go into the continued marginalization you face when you're on Medicare- suffice it to say that you're treated by the nurses and the healthcare professionals as though you are a drug addict who can't hold a job when that had nothing to do with it- we were just poor (I will add that most of the doctors were exceptions- they did not have the same attitude toward the people they treated for some reason- but I didn't see an actual doctor very often). Anyway we survived it and I was glad for the care because when I was pregnant with my second child, they discovered I had cervical pre-cancer. After she was born I was treated for it successfully and have not had a re-occurrence but had I not had Medicaid I wouldn't have been able to afford the care I received (I was still covered under post-natal care).
After the girls were born I was a waitress ($2.10 an hour + tips) and the kid's father was a painter ($8 an hour when he was working-weather dependent work) we still didn't have healthcare for our young children or ourselves because we decided we'd rather eat. At some point my oldest got pink eye and a doctor who did occasional pro bono work did see her and gave me a prescription for the medicine. The medicine was expensive but I was just grateful that I didn't have to pay the doctor for the visit itself. This went on for a few years- and there was a point when the kids would get sick and there was no doctor to take them to (the previously mentioned doc had some office problems and shut down) and we just prayed that it never turned serious.
You might ask why I didn't check on Medicaid at this point... good question. I had had such a bad experience with the whole system when the girls were little that when their medicaid expired, I never reapplied. I hated the way they treated me and my kids. I would have reapplied if anything serious had happened- they require you to before hospital admittance but fortunately nothing that serious ever occurred.
Up to this point, it's all been about being uninsured. It was scary and worrisome but we made it through. In fact, I am quite grateful now that Medicaid was there and think my pride was a little overdone. I shouldn't have put my girls through some of the difficulties that I did. Later, when I had foster kids and they had Medicaid, I didn't find it so incredibly insulting. It's not great but it's not as insulting as I made it out to be with my first two children. In retrospect, I was oversensitive because I was young.
So, sometime in 1996-7ish the kid's dad was in business for himself and I was doing home daycare and the income was decent enough that we weren't worrying about where food was coming from. We were finally making enough money to get insurance, so we shopped around and found an insurer that allowed us to buy into a group so that we weren't paying an outrageous figure for insurance- I say it wasn't outrageous but the cost was still $800.00 per month which felt pretty outrageous. I can't imagine what it would cost now. I am not even sure who the insurance was at this point but we got it just in time because I became pregnant with our third child around the same time. It was quite different having a child in a private hospital under the same doctor's care.
I should add right here that we were fortunate that we were healthy at that time and the insurance group didn't reject us. Part of what the ACA does (in states, like Colorado, that are accepting it) is force insurances to accept people regardless of pre-existing conditions. If we had been unable to afford insurance at that time and had had to wait a few years, my son and older daughter were diagnosed with asthma and were both hospitalized for it. Insurance(in those states who refuse to accept the ACA this will still be the case) is really gambling, companies don't take people that have a risk factor that will cost them money. It made sense for them because why would they want to take someone that was obviously a payout not a pay-in? A few years later and we might never have found insurance and we could have been in really dire straits. Luckily, we got insurance prior to his birth and my daughter was not yet showing symptoms of asthma (that we noticed).
The insurance we had didn't last too long. Rates increased and we had to find something more affordable so we moved to Kaiser Permanenete. the cost still went up but the other was going up quite a bit and there were some benefits to Kaiser. There were some definite downsides to being part of the integrated managed care consortium but I think that is where I will end this part of my discussion about "why insurance in the U.S. sucks" for now. Thanks for your patience and I hope you come back for the rest of it!
How about you? Do you have good healthcare?
