I’ve been watching all this news coverage about the health care debate, much as many of you have. There are so very many things that bother me about the tone that this country is taking now. Half of me says please just stop covering the crazy out there, it makes us look like we’re all insane when all you see on the news is morons showing up to presidential events standing on church property with semi-automatic weapons. The other half says keep showing the crazy, it’s opening the eyes of all the independants, all the people on the fence. When your party is getting nothing but the crazy exposure of the extreme right holding up signs of our elected (honestly elected as opposed to fake Florida elected) President dressed like Hitler then suddenly you look like a pack of wackadoo’s and people run to the other side.

Let me put all this health care debate into real person perspective for you. For those of you that are regular readers, or up to date readers you know about my cancer scare. You all know my mother had breast cancer at the young age of 40. My Doctor, and all other doctors recommend that i have regular mammograms starting at age 30. I am now 31. I went through the scare, the sleepless nights, the unexpected medical expenses of just the copays and prescriptions and the quite real fear that I was going to end up being sick, not cold sick, Cancer sick.

I have insurance, our insurance isn’t great, but it’s not horrible. Thankfully I have a company that takes a lot of the expense of coverage for me. Thankfully for my coverage for my husband and myself I don’t go broke every paycheck trying to just keep us insured. However, even my insurance, my fairly good insurance largely failed me. Two months after my cancer scare I got a bill from the medical imaging facility that had provided my biopsy and mammogram and ultrasound. Apparently my insurance decided to cover a portion but not all of my bill for services. I owe them an additional $200+. Granted for my husband and I this is not a HUGE amount of money, it’s painful but it won’t force us to skip bills. For others, that single bill means they no longer have money to pay rent, buy food, buy gas to get to and from the job that will pay for what the insurance will not.

After getting and opening the bill, hubby of mine looked at me and said you know, if you’d really been sick one or both of us would have probably had to file bankruptcy. The sad part is, he’s completely right. We were one positive test result away from not only dealing with months of chemo or surgery and recovery or radiation, based on what my insurance DID cover vs what it did not we would have been drowning by this point in medical bills.

So please, pretty please do not tell me that we do not as a country need some type of healthcare reform. Please do not tell me that it is OK for an insurance company to suddenly decide that someone who is sick, and has been sick for years is no longer “insurable” forcing them to go to an insurance plan where they still pay hundreds of dollars of month that in the end saves them some money but not what it should. Personally, having a parent who has reached the “uninsurable” level and seeing what they go through with what they pay just to get SOME level of coverage I think the insurance companies already have their own Death Panels, composed of people just looking out for the bottom line, just trying to get that profit.

I can only assume that the people out there protesting, holding the signs, making a scene have either never been sick, or had a scare, or seen a friend or relative go bankrupt or go without care simply because they cannot afford to get the care they need. They’ve never gotten a bill, a letter from an insurance company saying that test to see if you had cancer? Yeah you didn’t really NEED that so we’re not paying it, even though you give us thousands of dollars a year. Either that or they’re all on the insurance company payrolls. I hope my country wakes up soon, gets past whatever this bullshit is that is holding us back and making us all look insane. Perhaps we need to have a sane people rally, where we can all show up and just stand there quietly saying thank you that someone finally is intent on making a change.