Hear My Story: I’m insured (for now), but I want health insurance reform

MOMocrats are honored and happy to welcome successful author and advocate Melissa Stanton as a guest blogger covering the ongoing health care reform discussion. Today, the Senate Finance Committee is voting on the health bill. It's a landmark day, and hopefully the Senate will hear voices such as Melissa's on this topic. She offers the perspective so many of us can relate to: a "rags to riches to rags to riches. . ." history of on again/off again health care. Read on for Melissa's story. . .

I’m very lucky. I have health insurance through my husband's corporate job.

That coverage, though, requires that we pay several hundred dollars a month out-of-pocket toward the premiums, and of course for the deductibles, co-pays, etc. But, we didn’t have to apply for the insurance, and since it’s a group health plan, we couldn’t be denied coverage due to any pre-existing conditions. (Have you heard? A c-section can be considered a pre-existing condition.)

Although my family is currently blessed with decent employer-sponsored health coverage, I am a strong believer in health insurance reform, including a public option. Experience tells me that good fortune doesn't always last.

As a child in the mid-1970s, my father and stepfather were both unemployed at the same time due to corporate layoffs. Although my mother and my dad's wife worked, neither had jobs with health coverage. I remember being very sick (with some strange allergy that left me puffed up and covered in hives) and not being able to see a doctor due to our lack of health insurance, and money.

As an adult, my insurance fortunes have varied between near rags and comparative riches.

I landed a staff job with benefits soon after college. However, when the magazine I worked for folded, I spent $400 a month for medical and dental coverage premiums as an unmarried 25-year-old. My access to coverage came through COBRA, the federal law that allows workers to keep their employer-sponsored health benefits for 18 months after a job loss by paying the full cost of the premiums. (In response to the bad economy and the escalating cost of insurance premiums, President Obama signed legislation earlier this year enabling laid off employees to pay just 35 percent of the cost of coverage for nine months. While $350 a month in premiums sure is better than, say, $1,000, it's still a big bill to foot when you're unemployed. Not only that, the discount and the coverage expires.)

Fortunately, I immediately found work after that layoff; however, my new employer (one of the largest magazine publishing companies in the world) hesitated to put people on staff, lest it have to pay for benefits and absorb other employee costs. So I worked as a freelancer, or “independent contractor,” which meant I did the same work as staff members did, but without any insurance, paid vacation, 401-k or job protections. Marriage eventually supplied me with coverage, as did my eventual hiring as a full corporate citizen worthy of a fantastic package of employee benefits.

A decade later, when my husband lost his Wall Street-area, Internet-industry job due to layoffs and accepted a hard-to-turn-down consulting position in Maryland, I left my corporate career in New York. Although I redirected my work efforts toward freelance assignments and caring for our toddler son, because my spouse received no employee benefits (remember, he was a consultant), I sought out a family-flexible retail job that paid just $10 an hour but provided health insurance for a 30 hour week. (These days, with employers, and especially retail employers, slashing hours and benefits, such a work-for-the-insurance option might be nearly impossible to find.)

Soon after, I became pregnant with twins. I quickly became too sick to work and was put on bed rest. I had to quit the job. (I hadn’t been there long enough for disability leave.) We wound up paying nearly $1,000 a month for family coverage premiums through COBRA. We were lucky to be able to keep (and afford) the employer-contracted group coverage. If we'd been forced to shop for private insurance on the open market, the cost would have likely been higher, and my pregnancy would almost certainly have been deemed a pre-existing condition and excluded from coverage. By the time our 18-month access to COBRA expired my husband had become a staff employee, and with that change in status we were once again the beneficiaries of employer-sponsored insurance.

One of the many things I think is missing from the current health care debate is a sense of “There but for the grace of God go I.”

People who have health insurance—through an employer, a spouse, a union, a government-funded source such as Medicaid or Medicare, a Daddy-financed trust fund, or some other sort of group plan (such as being a member of Congress!)—just don’t understand what it’s like not to have access to affordable health insurance and medical care.

I’ve noticed that the disconnect and insensitivity is especially fierce among people who have always been fortunate enough to have health insurance. I’ve actually heard it said that workers who don’t have insurance due to a job loss, or because they can’t afford it, have only themselves to blame for not picking a more secure or better paying profession. (I’ve been told this by the stay-at-home wife of a doctor and a bank-industry couple who, by dumb luck I’m sure, have survived a succession of bank mergers and layoffs without ever losing their jobs.)

The problem with such people is often, frankly, ignorance. They have no clue that the rules are different for an insurance shopper on the open market than for someone who is handed a group policy through an employer. Many have never even heard of COBRA, or if they have, they don’t understand that the newly unemployed person is paying the full cost of the premium, not just the smaller charge that an employer may deduct from a paycheck. (Incredibly enough, I know a human resources executive who didn’t understand this distinction.) I’ve also listened to the grumbling of senior citizens and military people who rattle on about Socialism and believe that expanding coverage to all will take coverage away from them. (Gee, who funds their insurance and income? And, gosh, you’d think the elderly would be concerned for the well-being of their children and grandchildren.)

A once-close friend recently challenged my views by asking, “Why should health care be a right?” I responded that instead of arguing about whether health care is a “right,” we need to accept that it’s a reality.

The reality is that all people need health care, and dealing with that reality is a collective responsibility—unless we want to be a nation in which only those with enough money and luck thrive and survive. (In others words, “break a leg” that you don’t actually break a leg.)

Oddly, the most vociferous health care opponents I personally know consider themselves to be “pro life,” “Christian,” and “patriotic.” This is where I have a disconnect. Consider these questions:

• People without health insurance and health care die, so shouldn’t universal health care be a “pro life” position?
  
• Would Jesus really be for protecting insurance company profits and denying health care coverage to all?
  
• Is it an American value to care only for the wealthy?
  
• Is it good for the economy to put the responsibility for health coverage on employers who, when they can’t afford to pay for coverage, just don’t?

• Additionally, does it make sense that smokers with insurance can have all sorts of treatments for their self-inflicted cancer but health-conscious, working adults who have no insurance (say, because of a pre-existing condition or family history) can be left to die—or else treated and burdened for life by medical bills?
  
• Is it good for the United States to be the only developed nation in which people actually declare bankruptcy due to their medical expenses?
  
• Most of all, is it an American value to be fighting with one another about whether or not to provide a medical safety net to everyone?

Frankly, I do wonder if we’d have had screaming tea baggers and death panel lies if health care reform was being promoted by Republicans rather than Democrats. I expect that George W. Bush would have been praised as the “compassionate conservative” he claimed to be if he had promoted health care for all. Instead, we all know the names extremists have been calling President Obama.

Americans need affordable, comprehensive, permanent health insurance.

How that coverage should be provided (be it through the private or public sector, or some combination thereof) requires rational thought and discussion, not crazed distortions and shouting. To continue having a society of haves and haves nots—consisting of "haves" who can overnight become “have nots”—is immoral and unsustainable. While individuals suffer directly, our nation suffers as a whole.

Melissa Stanton is the author of The Stay-at-Home Survival Guide: Field-tested strategies for staying smart, sane, and connected while caring for your kids (Seal Press/Perseus Books). She blogs at www.reallifesupportformoms.com.

Comments

[Allison]

I could never have said it better myself. This is totally how I feel. I've been lucky enough to be covered for all but about 3 years of my life (sadly, in my long run, those are perhaps the 3 most critical years of my life when it comes to my health, but now I can only pick up the pieces, there's nothing that can really be done to "repair" anything. At least I wasn't deadly sick then. That I know of.), but the quality of coverage from my husband's employer has decreased considerably. Health insurance was a big factor in his union going on strike 9 years ago!!

[Hope west]

great blog! insurance coverage in this economy is a circus!

[Amy@UWM]

I had that same argument about health care being a "right" with a close friend too. This is a friend who sends his kids to public school. If education is a right in this country, why shouldn't health care be? And those who don't want to pay for public financing of health care don't realize that they already pay for unpaid hospital bills on the back end through their tax burden. It's just this way, more people are dying and unable to be contributing members of society because they can't afford to get the health care they need.

And speaking of rights, how about this argument -- the preamble to the Constitution -- the document that outlines our rights -- says, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, secure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity..." (thank you School House Rock). What about hard working Americans who do everything right, are hard working members of society and then through their own bad luck get a devastating health condition and can't afford the costs of care because they either don't have/can't afford insurance or they can't afford the portion of the costs that insurance can't cover. What about that establishes justice or promotes the general welfare of ourselves and our posterity? How about our system of sick care (vs. well care)? Is that promoting the general welfare of our citizens?

Climbing down off the soap box now. I just don't get people who oppose health care reform. Just. don't. get it.