This is a question I ask myself a lot. What will it take to create a health care system that truly cares for all people, sick and well, young and old, healthy and not?
It seems self-evident to me what we need. But my eyes were opened a bit about the way the rest of the world sees it when I sat in on a class at the Center for Patient Partnerships here in Madison.
The guest speaker was a woman who's worked in health care policy at the national and state levels. She explained that in order to change policy, there must first be some shared perception of a problem. And she pointed out that for those who have great health care (say, our elected officials), there is no perception of a problem and so no incentive to work toward change.
Which makes it all the more clear to me that we need to raise our voices around inequities in the health care system. Add your story here if it's appropriate. If it's not, please send it to me. I think maybe we need another blog where we can collect stories of the inequities of the health care system--and then send them to every member of Congress as often as possible.
5 comments:
I might as well copy my comment on your last post and paste it here.
Kudos for fighting.
I'm lucky enough to have a good job with good insurance. I also have extremely bad teeth, a combination of many years without insurance, poverty during those years (checkups were not an option), and genetically crappy teeth.
Even with good insurance, I still can't get my teeth taken care of. I have one that's about to implode, and I can't afford the $2,000 it's going to take to fix it. Insurance will pay about $300 of the total, and the rest is up to me. I maxed out my credit card with the last treatment ($2,000 for two teeth) and I'm at the end of my resources.
It was just brought to my attention again that PPOM American Community Insurance has an exclusion of eating disorder diagnoses for outpatient mental health treatment although they cover other form of outpatient mental health treatment, what in the world is that about? ED are the most lethal of all mental health diagnoses and they are not going to pay for treatment?
Insurers here in Wisconsin will do ANYTHING to avoid paying for an e.d. And it's an automatic disqualification for private insurance.
It's the same old shell game, darlin!
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