Insurance, I Can’t Afford to Live Without It
Insurance is a big problem for those people with chronic conditions that require medications to keep them alive. Diabetes is one of those conditions. I was very fortunate for the first 13 years of my disease to have my dad working at a good company that provided insurance that really couldn’t be topped. They paid for everything. When I was in the hospital for a couple weeks when I was diagnosed with diabetes the entire stay was covered. When I was in the hospital (ICU) with dka 3 years ago my stay was covered. I’ve been covered through a lot of things. Over $30,000 in hospital bills and we only paid about $300, 1 percent of the total cost. My first pump, 5 years, fully covered, I have no clue what it cost, I never saw an invoice, all the pump supplies, fully covered, I just had to call and reorder them ever month or so (I don’t remember). I was blessed to have daddy working for a good company that provided us with such good insurance. When I graduated highschool, I was able to stay on his plan because I was a full time student in college. And then I turned 25 last year, and I couldn’t get medicaid because even on my poor college student earnings I was making to much money. I couldn’t get blue cross blue shield because of my diabetes. The hospital where all my doctor appointments are had a thing for low income people but not only did I try to contact them on several occasions and get them to send me information, they never sent it to me. I was up shits creek without a paddle. I actually lost my insurance a month before my 25th birthday without my knowledge, I didn’t know until I started receiving $300 bills for doctor’s appointments that should’ve been covered. I freaked. Then a couple weeks before my 25th birthday I received a letter from COBRA.
COBRA saved my life. I had to pay a hefty fee to keep the insurance that I had had all my life, but when it comes down to it, I can’t afford to not have that insurance. In the year and a half that I’ve been paying for COBRA I’ve paid less than 8k. 2 months ago, it paid for itself, I spent four days in the hospital, specifically ICU for diabetic ketoacidocis (dka). I paid $100 for my visit, the cost, a little over $8k.
Currently, I pay a little over $400 a month for my health insurance. If I didn’t have it, I’m looking at $300 in test strips (yes, a dollar a strip), $600 in insulin (2 vials), $200 in pump supplies, and other miscellaneous expenses (lancets, glucose tabs, batteries, alcohol swabs, syringes, and god only knows what I’m forgetting). Half of what I bring home monthly would go to medical supplies if I didn’t have the health insurance I have. And that doesn’t even include doctors visits, which without insurance would average in the $300 a visit range. It’s just amazing to me what we have to do as diabetics to stay alive.
I’m looking at 2 more years of being able to be on COBRA before I have to find a way to pay for all my medical needs. At which point, I ponder:
1) How long do I have to work jobs that I am completely unsatisfied with all in the name of insurance
and
2) What about the concept of socialized insurance
I’ll start with socialized insurance because it was such a brief pondering. Socialized insurance (in my opinion) is going to be crap if that’s what we’re heading for. I imagine it to be what I have now at my current job. Insurance just for the sake of having insurance, it’s not a great plan, the deductibles and co-pays are high, it doesn’t pay for crap, and it’s not going to help you until you’re lying in a hospital bed dying. And actually, if you’re lying in the hospital bed dying, you won’t have need for the insurance in the first place, you are after all dying. That’s my opinion of socialized insurance, and personally, I don’t want any part of it.
And then there’s the whole work to live thing. I shouldn’t have to work to live. I should be able to enter a job that I’ll fully enjoy and not ever have to worry about the benefits of that job. Why should I have to enter a job that’s actually going to be the death of me because of the high stress nature of the type of job I’d get into just to have the great benefits (read: insurance) so that I can live. It’s a whole bunch of bull crap if you ask me. The jobs one enjoys, rarely come with the benefits necessary to survive. I’m in a job right now, I love it and would rather not have to think about leaving it, but the insurance is crap, and I took this job over another job where the insurance would have met what I had growing up (read: CIGNA). I took this job because it was more secure, it was a smaller company, it’s less stressful, and I completely (normally, most of the time) enjoy my job. And because I took it, I suffer, they pay for our insurance, our piece of crap PPO plan through Blue Cross. It pays for nothing (this is what I imagine socialized insurance to be like).
And this whole path of thought brings me to something else. If I had a choice, to sit a job where I was completely bored and miserable because my brain wasn’t being used (which usually leads to huge amounts of trouble) where I’d have excellent medical coverage as opposed to a job that I loved and I woke up each morning excited to go to where I had completely crappy insurance, which would I choose. Would I sacrifice years of my life in the name of happiness, or would I sacrifice happiness in the name of years of my life. Of course, as I write that, I realize that I wouldn’t be fully happy at the happy job because I would be feeling miserable because my diabetes wasn’t receiving the care it deserved.
We’re in between a rock and a hard place no matter how I look at it. So there’s really only one more way to solve this darn insurance conundrum. The makers of all our supplies have to slash their prices. It costs all of like 8 cents to produce a test strip, why am I paying almost a dollar? And don’t give me that research crap, a lot of the research is funded by the government or by charities. Insulin hasn’t changed all that much in the last 15 years, sure, a little tweak here, a little tweak there, so why is it still costing us $300 a vial? My answer, if there were a cure for diabetes (of all types), that epidemic that is growing in the US (largely among the Type 2 diabetes), pharmaceutical companies would lose a lot of money. Some companies gross a billion in profit a year thanks to their diabetes divisions. They should give that money back to us so that we didn’t have to choose between “I LOVE this job” and the “I’m bored to tears job” all in the name of health insurance to pay for the supplies that take of our diabetes to keep us alive so that we can go back to work the next day and do it all over again: “I’m bored to tears”…
This is excerpt from my NaNoWriMo project: Confessions of a Type 1 Diabetic. For the curious, it’s 1329 words bringing my NaNoWriMo total to 8924 words.
3 Responses to “Insurance, I Can’t Afford to Live Without It”
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November 6th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
[...] Original post by RideToRemedy.com - Riding To Cure Diabetes [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 12:40 am
[...] admin wrote an interesting post today on Insurance, I Can’t Afford to Live Without ItHere’s a quick excerptMy answer, if there were a cure for diabetes (of all types), that epidemic that is growing in the US (largely among the Type 2 diabetes), pharmaceutical companies would lose a lot of money. Some companies gross a billion in profit a … [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 8:56 am
OMG… I know exactly what you’re saying. I have pretty decent insurance with my job right now. It’s not 100% covered like yours used to be, but it’s about 90% covered and the deductible and copays are reasonable. However, I hate my job. I’d love to quit, but I finally have all the insurance stuff straightened out. It really is a sad state we’re in to have to choose between liking your job and getting the health insurance we need.