Over a period of four years, 7 million Americans lost their health insurance. That was as of Jan 2019, so the figures now are likely higher, what with the current administration’s war on the Affordable Care Act, and people are dying because of it:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-healthcare-medical-costs
As horrible as that is, it’s not simply people losing their health insurance: it’s also federal policy changes that result in loss of services, including prescriptions, and the effect is worldwide.
This is one of the (many) reasons I say ‘vote!’ so often; so much is riding on it.
Or even WITH health insurance. Virtually everybody knows someone, or is someone, who bypassed some form of care because they couldn’t afford the co-pay/deductible. I personally rushed into a major surgery on Christmas Eve so I could get it in before my deductible reset. And that was 15 years ago.
Yeah we have really shitty insurance right now and it’s basically so we go LESS bankrupt if there is a huge accident. Like fuck if we’re going to a doctor for a checkup or something. And we’re lucky we don’t need medication right now.
The story I always come back to when this topic comes up is of the man who had an infection in his tooth, no insurance, and two prescriptions to be filled: one for painkillers and one for antibiotics. He couldn’t afford both, and the pain was excruciating, so he got the painkillers. Because he didn’t have the antibiotics, the infection spread to his brain and he died. (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171) What kills me is that when I tried to google for a source article, several other US cases like this came up. It shouldn’t be so common!
Nobody should ever, ever have to make a call like that. It’s just insane that, in an age when deaths like that are preventable, they still happen. People should come before profits, especially where life and death is involved.
Heartbreaking and so fucking common. I currently know someone rationing her insulin. And she didn’t even get diabetes the “bad way” where it’s “her fault” (just spouting troll talking points, I don’t feel that way). She has Type I and was born like that.
Hubs has been Type 1 for 40 years (since his mom found him passed out on the bathroom floor at age 7). Banting and Best did not sell their patent for a dollar so that the drug companies could make incremental changes to insulin to keep jacking up the price. It’s infuriating. Hubs will always have to have a job with good insurance, or stay at a job that sucks if the insurance is good.
People have also been taking fish antibiotics:
https://www.newsweek.com/people-us-are-buying-fish-antibiotics-online-taking-them-themselves-1476658
(should have included that in the article!)
And even when people DO have insurance and DO get care, that care is sometimes scarily sub-par.
My best friend and her husband wound up taking his mother to the hospital on Sunday, for a suspected heart attack. (That she had at the funeral of her husband, his father, no less.) They went to a large hospital in a well-off part of Long Island, NY. The cardiac ward was so over-full, they put her in a bed IN THE HALLWAY. And while they have been there in the hallway, my friend met another woman and her husband; the woman is in the cardiac ward too, and she had been in a bed in the hallway FOR SIX DAYS.
Like… what the fuck is even going on? This all sounds INSANE to me.
(The good news is that my friend’s MIL did not actually have a heart attack; she passed out due to dehydration and stress. So like… that’s the good news, I guess. And they can get out of there pretty soon.)