The health insurance system is broken
I remember when I was younger being accident prone. Sometimes I thought the emergency room was my second home. I used to laugh at Tim Allen’s character from his TV show, Home Improvement, being on a first name basis with all the people in the emergency room. I was, too. But at that young age, I didn’t understand anything about insurance. All I knew was it was something that your parents had on you and if you got hurt the insurance took care of most of your medical bills. Let’s fast forward to the present.
I listen to commercials on television about older people cutting their pills in half and only taking half of their prescribed dosage because they can’t afford it. I didn’t understand it before I got sick. Now that I deal with insurance companies on my own behalf, I understand them all too well. Recently, I went to try to get my power wheel chair replaced. The one that I have is about ten years old and will no longer hold a charge. At this point, it is basically a very large paperweight. The insurance companies make you jump through hoops. Even when you have completed all of their steps and instructions, there is no guarantee you can get what you actually need. I had to go to my doctors for a mobility assessment.
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the chair is something that would definitely make my life a little easier. It took nine months of the ball being dropped before I finally got my appointment with the physical therapist office, the place that was supposed to measure and evaluate my needs. I don’t know why, perhaps because of the insurance company’s guidelines, they were prepared to offer me only the most basic of power chairs. They would not even allow me an attendant’s bracket so that the control could be moved to the back of my wheel chair so whoever was with me could run the controls. Okay. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful but that particular chair will not help for me to get around the way they think I can. Trust me here. You don’t want a blind lady driving anywhere by herself!
In recent years, we have seen the return and rise of measles and smallpox. Now there’s a polio like virus that has been affecting people from as nearby as Pittsburgh. Is this some mutated disease? Could some of these ailments been prevented by vaccinations? I don’t understand why the regulations regarding children being vaccinated before starting school ever changed. As a kid, I was not fond of getting shots, so being vaccinated was not to my liking, but it was necessary to prevent and eventually eradicate serious life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox.
This unfortunately ties in with immigration. If we are allowing people into our country, which I believe we should, I think they should also have to be vaccinated. If they are already infected with measles or smallpox, they should be kept in quarantine until such time as they are medically cleared. Immigration laws were much stricter back in the day. They directly affected my family. My uncle, as a young boy in Italy could not board the boat with his father to come to America because he had an ear infection. He never saw his father again. That was sad; that is sad.
The people of this country are sad. The country’s natural resources are critically low. Our clean air and water laws are being changed and not for the better. We are financially crippled and we’re psychologically impaired. As for the criminal element, it is just totally out of hand. Substance addiction is beyond our control. Good political leadership is absent. Empathy is almost nonexistent. I could go on and on but I’m sure if anyone who is reading this would take a few minutes to look around or question their own beliefs, they would see the seriousness of the situation and realize the immediate need to fix the problems. I don’t have the answers, but if we all pitched in to help, we could make a difference.
I think it is a shame that you can have insurance and still need to find other programs to help pay for things. The insurance designed for the elderly and the disabled barely cover the basics, and so much lies beyond their reach. Thank goodness there are some programs out there. You just have to look for them. My solution is very simple. Instead of making everything so difficult, why don’t pharmaceutical companies just lower the prices of medicines so people who need these things can afford them and increase monthly payments so people can live like human beings. Remember: Social Security in not a benefit, but an entitlement. We pay into it our entire working lives and most people get less than a poverty level monthly income.
Kathy Bartolotta is a resident of Tower Hill Two.