Health Care Option

Health Care Reform rally on the grounds of the Georgia Capitol. Thomas Watson looms over Paw Paw Bill's head.

Here’s what will happen to you in America when you get sick. Not IF you get sick, but WHEN you get sick. Human organisms, even Americans, are born guaranteed to get sick and die.

First you will lose your job. After you have exhausted your sick leave and all the protections provided by the Federal Government meddling with personal freedom, you will be terminated from the job you have held, no matter how long, and performed no matter how faithfully and at personal risk and sacrifice to your loving family, who could have used some of your attention.

When you are terminated from your job, your medical insurance will be cancelled because it is provided by your ex-employer as a benefit to its employees.

If you have disability insurance, the insurance conglomerate that is supposed to pick up only a fraction of your income to replace your lost wages now that you are unemployed, that conglomerate will insist that you apply for Social Security Disability. If Social Security denies your claim, the insurance conglomerate will use that denial to maintain you are not really disabled. If you are awarded SSDI, the insurance conglomerate will reduce their payment to you by the amount provided by the Federal Government.

If you had the option and forethought to pay extra for an employer health insurance plan with a fixed deductible rather than something like a 20-percent co-pay, you are out of pocket a $1,000 or so. If you now must pay 20-percent of a hospital bill that can easy amount to a million dollars, you will probably end up in bankruptcy court.

You will, of course, not be able to get any more private health insurance, because you now have a pre-existing condition. Meanwhile, if your sickness requires prescription medications to keep you alive or prevent intolerable pain, you will pay half your reduced income for those prescriptions, even though the same medications are available elsewhere, including Canada, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, at a cost 25-percent or less of what you pay in the United States.

If you are declared eligible for SSDI, after two years, you will become automatically eligible for Medicare, no matter what your age. At that time you will, like Paul on the road to Damascas, convert to belief in single payer, public option, socialized medicine.

I am not making any of this up. I am telling you exactly from my own experience, also shared by countless others. If you do not want to believe us, I hope you will never get sick, but your chances are not even slim and none. Your chances of never getting sick are only none.

Of course, if you are already without a job and/or without health care insurance, you still have the option of just going off into the woods when you get sick to die like the wild animals.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter