REALITY?: Healthcare

After spending almost all of yesterday coming up with figures and ideas to help comprehend my own feeling that we should step away from the idea of insuring every American and head towards the more feasible and reasonable concern that every American should have access to free medical services, I'm sort of feeling that it was a waste of time. For one thing, my betters have argued the point, folks with more intelligence and knowledge than I and yet what seems to me to be a logical and fair distribution and assurance of healthcare for all isn't accepted as such. Only one politician, Dennis Kucinich, comes to mind as having considered this train of thought.

Secondly, I realize that my husband and I may be rather unusual in that we've each had only one major surgery and hospital stay in our lives, haven't gone to doctors on a routine basis until recently, each have maybe one or two emergency room visits, haven't been on prescription medications until recently (he for maybe five years, me, one and half years) and if we have a cold we use cough medicine and chicken soup. Also, when looking at my parents (who died at ages 90 and 92), my mother was in the hospital three times giving birth, once for gall bladder surgery, and then after her final fall, move to a rehab and then to an Alzheimers unit–all of which was a 6 week total term–and my dad's single surgery for appendicitis when he was a kid, I'm safe in saying that we haven't been much of a drain on the system. Maybe we're not your average family.  But there is more information to be found that could give a more accurate picture, such as even this on health care costs by EBRI as well as government statistics. Another good one from Families USA here.

So what my day has resulted in is just this, a 2008 breakdown of our own expenses and costs, and as such, is not likely a valid argument without a larger cross-section of families with which to compare. It did make me a bit more convinced in my own argument however, to at least feel that this course of action should be investigated a bit more throroughly and, of course, to be strongly against any further bailout offering to the insurance industry.