Canada or Bust

For the last three years I've been living in Athens, Ohio attending Ohio University as all of you probably know. Even though they have a well-known record for misdiagnosis and borderline malpractice, Hudson Health Center is close, convenient, usually quickish, and bills your student account so you don't have to worry about it later. From routine STD tests to viral identification, virtually all of my blood work has been processed through Athens Medical Laboratories, Hudson's primary medical lab. Not until a few weeks ago did I know that my healthcare company, United Healthcare, did not pay for any of my lab work as AML is "out of network". Not once did anybody at Hudson, AML, or UHC inform me that I was sending information to a lab my insurance would not pay for. Now I owe them $350.00.

Last year I went to a wonderful dentist recommended by a friend because I hadn't been to a dentist in at least a decade and I was concerned about the welfare of my teeth. The dentist asked me, "you smoke out of the right side of your mouth don't you?" which, after my confirmation, she followed up with "I can tell by the staining on your teeth. But who didn't smoke in college?" After receiving a surprising and soothing bill of clean dental health, they sent me on my way with the added comfort that I would not be receiving a bill, as United Concordia, my dental insurance company, should cover everything. In October I got a $200.00 bill from Riestenberg and Lavelle, DDS. That's what United Concordia decided not to pay.

This past June I came down with a very strange viral infection; I was nauseous, running a very high fever, sweating bullets, and chronically dehydrated. After Hudson failed me it took four different people to convince me to go to the emergency room since I was terrified of receiving a $4000 bill later in the year. Nonetheless I went, and O'Bleness Memorial Hospital basically did to me everything Hudson did, with the addition of a crying baby and fat cunty white trash woman to keep me company in a large room divided by curtains into smaller examination rooms. I left, eventually got better, and never received the dreaded thousand dollar bill. I did, however, get billed for a $162.50 "physician's fee" that United Healthcare again refused to pay. O'Bleness sent the bill to a collection's agency a scant month after the due date.

Riestenberg and Lavelle, DDS and AML offered me a 'convenient' payment plan of $10/month until all outstanding debts are taken care of. HRRG, the collection agency on behalf of O'Bleness, demanded half of the $162.50 by January 1 and the other half by January 31. 

Today my mom and I went to get me glasses. My vision isn't bad yet, but it has noticeably deteriorated over the last couple years. I've tried before in Athens only to be told I don't have vision insurance. This afternoon though she called and was told United Healthcare would cover part of the expenses. Upon going to the eyeglass store, they told us that United Healthcare wouldn't cover a single cent because our vision insurance had been cancelled at some point in the past. Bear in mind that my mother has worn glasses for decades and is still paying for vision insurance. Infuriated and confused, we went home and she called them again, whereupon one representative told her UHC doesn't offer vision insurance anymore and another told her that all vision expenses must first be paid out of pocket and then we can mail in in a seven page rebate form signed by the ophthalmologist (who must be in network) and one to three months after that we will receive a check for some of the expenses.

To provide context, if I worked exactly the hours I'm scheduled at the bakery and didn't give any up in taxes, I would pull in a little over $730 a month. However, the actual number is almost half of that. Rent is $430 a month, electric is around $45, internet is $35, and water/trash pickup is $35. In addition to that I need to buy groceries, school supplies and textbooks (once every three months), anti-depressants (Wellbutrin costs me $50 a bottle once a month to my student account, which has to be paid in full in order to register for classes) and treat myself to something once in a while to avoid the full crushing oppression of poverty. If you think all that doesn't add up with my salary, you're damn fucking right. $20 a month to settle the dental and lab debts might not seem like much, but that is a substantial amount of money for the underemployed living paycheck to paycheck. And considering neither of my parents make enough money to support themselves, I am effectively financially independent and quickly amassing a relative mountain of medical debt. I just turned 21. I haven't even finished fucking college yet and I'm already being fucked because I had the nerve to get sick a couple of times.

Dare I say it though, I'm one of the lucky ones. An old friend of the Tome commented on my facebook:

I heard some sad assed stories from people that had gotten ill or had been in accidents who had never properly healed because of no access to health care. This one woman in her late 30s who ran a laundromat got hit by a car when she was in university. She had no healthcare. It placed her in a lifetime of debt and she basically became disabled as physiotherapy was unavailable to her. When I told her that where I came from all her surgeries and the physio afterward would have been looked after regardless of whether she was employed, unemployed, a student, not student, whatever, she cried. A week or so later when I was in there doing laundry a man who had been listening to our conversation the week before brought in an invoice from when he had heart surgery. He had health care coverage, but the bill detailed all the costs and expenses that had been incurred during for his surgery and his stay in the hospital. It had a total on it like $65K or something.

I've always known that insurance in America was a bit like choosing whether you'd like to lose a couple toes or your whole leg, but only recently has it really hit home. It's disgusting, revolting, and inhumane. How insurance companies, no matter health, car, dental, vision, home, life, flood, fire, tornado, whatever, can suck tens of thousands of dollars out of people because the patient had the shit-kicking luck of needing a little help and the insurance company, with annual profits in the billions of dollars, just can't bring themselves to absorb another $500 in losses.

Five hundred dollars is paltry to them but a fortune to me, and to millions of other people in the same situation. Nonetheless, they won't pay it. So it's up to us proles to live in even more destitution while the Ameristocracy--insurance companies, banks, and anyone else too wealthy for their own fucking good off the backs of poor people--rake in more and more through stock dividends, fine print, special fees, interest rates, and other asinine mechanisms designed by the rich to make them richer. It's realities like this that cast tons of horseshit on the idea popularized by Ronald Reagan, another opulent fascist cow, that the United States is "the last, best hope" and "a shining city on a hill." Reagan knew better. The upper class knows better. But the message isn't for them, its for us, and a great deal of my fellow Americans are inconceivably stupid enough to believe it. As long as this is the case, nothing will ever--ever--change.

Me? I hope to move to a country that actually had a socialist movement and watch Rome burn.