“..Strange Bedfellows: Me and Rush Limbaugh In Costa Rica..”
“.. “Why Rush Limbaugh would go to Costa Rica if Obama healthcare plan passes.”
I saw this on Yahoo news this morning.
My morning chuckle -what a dramatic story!
Oh my God, Obama’s plan will destroy US medicine - presumably because more people in need of medical care will have access to it ..
.. and those with endless ability to pay for costly private medical care, like Rush, will somehow be squeezed out.
What is interesting about this story is that Rush’s choice is to go to one of the most famously successful examples of socialized healthcare in the world.
I know, because this is my business: my company takes people abroad for health care.
About half of our patients are uninsured and find themselves utterly priced out of the US market.
But their reasons for being uninsured have nothing to do with the “bought me an iPod and a grill of gold teeth and the rest of America should pay for my Cheetohs-n-Video Games lifestyle” trope that seems to pervade any discussion of the state of American health insurance today.
They are uninsured because after years of paying in, they were shut out by insurers *legally* refusing to cover their illnesses and accidents.
My husband is one of these people.
A herniated disc from a skiing accident led to surgery, with an estimate of $3,000.
But that turned out to be the *surgeon fee* only - the hospital fee, which did not include an overnight stay, was..drumroll….$25,000.
The surgery was not successful; the surgeon nicked the protective sheath around the spinal column nerves, creating a spinal fluid leak that was visible - fluid collected in a large pouch at the base of his spine - not to mention agonizing.
What’s more fun than a cup’s worth of spinal fluid shooting up your spine and slamming into the base of your brain every time you sit down and stand up?
Turns out, everything is more fun than that .. while few things are scarier or more painful.
Husband went back to have the leak repaired, and the surgeon failed again.
And again.
But we were insured, and unworried.
Until the day we weren’t insured, because the surgical nick was determined to be a ‘pre-existing condition’ ..
..(figure that out now; go ahead, I’ll wait).
Our insurance was dropped and we were left holding the $265,000 bag.
We were now defined as ‘uninsured’, a word that does not really connote our history of responsibility in our own health care or that fact that our status is the simple result of being screwed by a for-profit system in which it is perfectly legal to drop members who don’t fit the profitability profile.
Not only that, we’re now uninsurable.
Who would touch us?..”
go to source/story>>Strange Bedfellows: Me and Rush Limbaugh In Costa Rica - Sandra Stephens - Open Salon