Arm and a leg: Americans are at their breaking point on health care

We are sick with the cost of medical care and health insurance in this country and what it is doing to small businesses and to employees.

When businesses have to choose between jacking up rates for employees or scrapping their plans altogether and casting their workers off into the barren wasteland of the Marketplace, nobody wins.

Nobody that is, except the insurance corporations. (Corporations are people, remember. Sympathetic types, too.) Then there are the pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Heck, call it what it is, the health care industrial complex.

So, the inevitable question becomes why we don't get the same health care afforded to Congress. Well, we do, sort of. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare if you're nasty, mandated that elected officials and their staffers purchase health insurance from the Washington, D.C., exchange. Perhaps that is part of the reason they wish to see it repealed.

 But most of those who hold office are wealthy and can afford gold--plated health care plans -- or their spouses can.  

And even if not, what they have access to is a far cry from what a working family of four, or an individual worker earning $25K a year, can afford to spend per month on health insurance.

It is no longer hyperbole -- for many it never was -- that millions of us are forced to choose between food, rent or mortgage payments, utilities, other basic monthly expenses, or health care.

Insurance premiums, doctor visits and procedures via co-pays and deductibles, and of course prescription drugs, literally break the bank for many people today who are seeing their retirement savings dwindle and their hopes for raises or promotions left to languish year after year.

 We could go on and on. Who really suffers from refusing to expand Medicaid in this state? People who used to balk at the idea are now starting to question its wisdom. Covering more of the low-income and impoverished population vastly reduces charity cases and bad debt for hospitals and would thereby lower some of these facilities' operating costs. Complex medical billing and coding force health care providers to hire something to the effect of three administrative personnel for every one hospital bed or patient treated.

Doctors will run every test and refer patients to every specialist they can think of just out of an abundance of caution in making a diagnosis to avoid being sued later for malpractice by someone who might accuse them of not being invested enough in their care.

Forget about prescription drug manufacturers. How many side effects does your commercial say your pill can cause? And you charge how much for a 30-day supply?

The system is sick and dying almost as fast as the people are, and those who can work, the good people we know well and care about who come in to their respective offices each day and perform their jobs to earn their paychecks, now have to fork over the equivalent of a house payment every month just on the off chance they or their child might get sick or injured?

Save your letters to the editor, our dearly elected.

We invite you to come here, Republican and Democrat, to Goldsboro, to Mount Olive, to Fremont, Pikeville, Seven Springs or Eureka. We'll make the drive to meet you. Come down here, hold a town hall and tell these people to their faces how this came to be and what you propose to do about it.

Because we are sick of it. 

Published in Editorials on November 7, 2017 11:16 PM