I hate insurance companies. Let me explain. Let’s start with car insurance. You pay your car insurance each and every month in case you get in an accident. Then you get in an accident. The insurance company balks at having to pay anything. Next, you can guarantee your monthly fee will go up, or the insurance company may drop you as you’re a bad risk.
Now, let’s talk about health insurance. Health insurance companies are all about making money. Billions and billions and billions of dollars. Actually, let’s make that trillions of dollars. In order to keep profits high, they make sure not to cover you if your health problems are too severe. If you submit a claim, health insurance companies will make it difficult, and you can be sure they will work doggedly to make sure there was no “preexisting condition.” Our lives and our health should never be overseen by an organization (insurance) whose main goal is to make a profit. Health care is inefficient in the United States, and it’s inordinately expensive. It is just plain wrong for, say, an elderly person to have to have to eat at McDonald’s in order to be able to afford pills that cost $200 each.
I don’t mean to be simplistic. This is a complicated issue, but at the root of everything and how screwed up the health system is are insurance companies.
Our country has before us an opportunity to change how health insurance companies operate with what President Obama is proposing. The fight will be huge, as the insurance companies have one hand in our pockets, while giving the money with the other hand to politicians and to buy enormously expensive advertisements. I’ve already seen them on TV. Have you?
Insurance companies are scared, and they’ll use every trick in the book to convince the American people that we need them. We don’t need them. It’s time to run the bad guys out of town. It’s time for a change. Our lives and our health are what are most important over everything else. Our money needs to go for doctors and treatments and medicines—not to a wheeling, dealing, money-making insurance company.
I plan on giving President Obama the support he will need to go forward to make our health-care system equitable for all.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 6, 2009.