Adrienne Sellers thought she made the right choice when she quit her job in Charleston and moved to Atlanta temporarily to help raise her grandchildren after her daughter was in a bad car accident. What Sellers didn’t anticipate was the way her own medical problem would devastate her life.
In December 2008, Sellers was just settling back into life on the peninsula after eight months away when a doctor told her the unbearable pain she felt was from a prolapsed uterus and a subsequent infection ”” and she’d better get surgery quick.
Sellers had a solid work history, but her health care coverage had lapsed while she was caring for her family and she didn’t have the money to pay for the expensive operation.
She is one of the hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians without health care coverage, a number that grows by 670 people each week. Depending on the estimate, roughly one out of every six South Carolinians does not have insurance.
[]Sellers learned all the past years of coverage didn’t matter because she didn’t have coverage when she needed it. She was 13 months too young to qualify for Medicare and in too much pain to wait for a Medicaid approval.[/]
So she WAS covered under Medicaid, but the wait was too long. Well, yeah, government run healthcare will take forever to process stuff like this. Waits for “elective” surgeries stories are all over the web from countries with socialized medicine.
The biggest problem with health coverage in this country is that it is tied to employment. We need to give the tax credit for health insurance back to individuals, “group” them like a business does and, and let the policy stay with the insured person, not the business. And, as a country, we need to wake up and realize the costs of healthcare. It doesn’t come cheap for anyone. Businesses know this; they have depressed wages for years to cover the increased cost of their “benefits packages”. Would we use it more wisely if we knew the true costs? As much as we want to believe otherwise, it is not “free”.
I read the whole article, and the comments. Recommend highly.