Marisol, you should read the Malcolm Gladwell article on healthcare economics to understand better why you are currently in this situation. You’ll find that a lot of the precepts that underlie our current system don’t really make a lot of common sense, nor do they actually work in practice.
Your situation is such because you are not part of a large group, so your personal situation can’t be offset by the law of large numbers. You also have no negotiating leverage so they can and will ding you with every condition they can think of. But mostly, because you are 1 and not 1 of 1000, the insurance companies don’t get the actuarial predictable behavior they like and find profitable. The other problem is that the entire system is based on the notion that all Americans are hypochondriacs, so that if they just price healthcare high enough and make it difficult enough to get, people will “reduce” their use of healthcare to economically efficient levels. Of course, I don’t and you probably don’t know anybody who gets up in the morning and decides they really want a doctor visit just because its covered and who knows, it might be a good idea. Instead, this system discourages people from going when some pathologies can be caught early, and only end up going when it becomes critical and a lot more expensive. That’s not an efficient system. Abuse of the system is way overstated and frankly, if somebody sat down and thought about it, they would find it hard to believe that many people would want to go, and hence, aren’t likely to do so.
A friend of a friend of mine, a 34 yr old woman, recently injured herself in a fall in her house earlier this year. After bearing the pain in her back for a few months, it became unbearable and went to the doctor. Over the course of a couple of weeks in December, the diagnosis went from fractured vertebrae to an ultimate diagnosis of Stage IV breast cancer, spread to her bones and liver. Her femur was replaced over Christmas, a procedure I didn’t even know was possible. As most of you know, there is no Stage V, so her prognosis is grim - 18-24 months with treatment, obviously a lot shorter without. Fortunately, if one can term it that, she had recently started a new job, so her treatments will be covered, although she was not there long enough to qualify for disability, so her other expenses will be problematic.
In any case, if one can imagine what position she would have been without coverage, I think its safe to say that those, including our esteemed Commander-in-Chief, should be able to agree that availability of ER visits is not exactly a healthcare policy. ER is fine for a broken arm, not so much for a real health problem. But hey, we’re in the greatest system in the world, so being on your own is definitely better than being covered, right?
