Young people don't need health insurance!

[feuervogel]

Insurance company: You can get a temporary policy, but if you want to continue it, you have to reapply. And if you use the temporary insurance, you've got a pre-existing condition, for which we'll deny you. That sounds fair. Sure.

The coverage my friends were able to purchase for their daughter was a 180 day policy. The terms of the policy required that, if they wanted to "renew" it, in effect, they had to reapply for it all over again. At which time, the insurance company was free to take into account any "pre-existing conditions" as a cause for denying coverage. "Pre-existing conditions", in this case, included any conditions for which the policy holder sought treatment for during the 180 days of coverage for which they had paid for.

Read also this post, about one of the victims of the health club shooting: a recent college grad without health insurance who can't afford the bill for the surgery (necessitated by some sick fuck who wanted to take revenge on all women for merely existing and not fucking him, apparently) so her friends & neighbors held a CAR WASH. A fucking car wash.

These are two examples of why this country needs universal coverage, like every other civilized nation on the planet.

Comments

[intravenusann.livejournal.com]

Okay!

Yeah, it's pretty heinous. It's heinous that people have to go to other countries to get the treatment they need, or to afford it, it's heinous that they can't afford emergency care, or when emergency care isn't available to them because of the quality of care available or its nonexistance. That, in a developed country that thinks so highly of itself, a mass of people can be killed in cold blood because of their gender and then the survivors are denied basic care for any reason--that's the kind of thing we think of happening Other Places and I hope that more people will take a look and realize that it isn't.

People are just very ignorant about the issues, here, and they've been lead by the nose with their ignorance until they are worked into a froth of fear, anger, and deliberate misinformation. And, unfortunately, no matter what the facts are a lot of people just won't hear it, because their minds are totally won over by greedy fear mongering.

If I had the heart or the time, I'd sit down everyone and calmly explain to them how a public insurance option works and how it's just a subsidized insurance option and paired with cuts in general health care costs it helps make sure that everyone can get life saving treatment and prevention when they need it and fewer loved ones and children and young people will have to die because they couldn't get the care they needed in a first world country.

(Guam does fundraising of the manual labor kind or the church collection kind for all kinds of big important things like health care costs and rebuilding people's homes or paying for funerals or whatever... I have no idea what the greater meaning of that is, aside from the community interdependence it's a part of)