Insurance companies rely on the cost of litigation to discourage people from winning rightful claims, or, as in my case, the company I worked for hired an insurance company for their expertise in avoiding payouts in order to rip off their own employees. Okay, nice work if you can get it, but there’s got to be a level in Hell reserved for those who deliberately take advantage of people at their most vulnerable; sick, tired, in pain, and then further hobbled by the loss of a paycheck, and, so much worse, the loss of their health insurance, at the time that they need it most! Any chance I had of finding a path back to productivity disappeared the moment they fired me. I had to leave Mayo before all of my appointments were completed (including the final one, in which all of the results are compiled and examined together, which is the whole point of what Mayo does), so I left with one diagnosis that helped a lot, but no coordination to help me to know what to do about it. I ended up in physical therapy that was completely wrong for my condition, which worsened it, no continuation of the meds they’d started me on, because I didn’t have a doctor that understood what was required, and it took me a couple of years of research and questioning to finally find a doctor that *did* know how to treat me. By that time, inactivity and pain had taken their toll on me, and I’m still fighting to recover from something that was completely avoidable.

Do I want free “Legal Care” so I can sue the hell out every asshole that was part of the process of cheating me out of what was rightfully mine? Do I want a “Free Lawyer” to get me compensation for everything I’ve lost in the last six years? Hell yes! My beloved bike is on my back porch. I keep the tires inflated, the lock on it, and the key on my key chain, and I have dreams about flying down the road on a warm rainy day, going nowhere in particular. I haven’t been able to ride it in all this time, and I’m very, very angry.

I’m not angry enough to punish the entire country with another entitlement program. Yes, I’ve read Swift, and I know that Ed is no more proposing this as a real solution than he would recommend his favorite recipe for Roasted O’Toole Progeny On Rice Pilaf, but I wanted to make very clear that the purpose of my little story is not to make an argument for government Legalcare, anymore than I would gobble up the O’Toole children, succulent though they may be. My point is that, if I’m not willing to hamstring the greatest country that the world has ever known in order to satisfy my personal grudges, why are so many other people so willing to do it for other reasons? Yes, I could have used “free” healthcare in the last few years, and I was damn lucky to have married a good man before all of this happened – a good man who has been more burdened by my circumstances than I have – who made sure that I never went without medications or other care, no matter how tight our money got, and it got damned tight.

But what kind of healthcare would it have been? I doubt that Uro-Gynecology will be a booming specialty under OCare. I doubt that Stanford will have the budget to continue their – remarkable – research into Narcolepsy. Think Mayo will become a really great free clinic? I doubt that too. The fact is, the kind of medicine that has been most instrumental in keeping me from stepping off of a cliff these last years, is exactly the kind that we’ll lose. I’ve become the master of PubMed, and the studies I’ve found there, to help myself, have been the discoveries that are new; promising, but not yet “proven”. The first thing I plan to buy when my money comes is a dose of Botox, the latest, experimental, treatment for intractable muscle spasm. Will it still be available for pain treatment under OCare? (maybe I can get it from the Pelosi Black Market?)
I’m betting that keeping me pumped up with opiates, provided by the annexed Afghan poppy fields, will be the less expensive, “proven effective” treatment. My life will suck, but it won’t cost me anything to keep living it, in a morphine fog.

I hate them for this. Such short-sighted, wasteful, evil people.

If we were voting on it, we’d actually read it.

No one reads it, it passes with flying colors, voila!

Binder and Binder. “We’ll deal with the government; you have better things to worry about.”

Oh, if only they would! Swiftly and permanently.

…the National Federal Obligatory Firearm Equity and Accessibility Requirement (NOFEAR) Act of 2009!

dlc2 on July 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM

FIFY.

But, after looking at some of the comments, I have to stand up for my noble profession! As I like to tell my friends and relatives, the problem is that 99% of lawyers give the other 1% of us a bad name. ;)

Consider my own situation. I was professionally employed in a field that I had worked in for ~15~ or so years. I had a good salary, health benefits, 401k, stock options, and both long and short term disability insurance. The benefits, as we all know, were part of my compensation package, therefore, I was paying for them out of my own pocket in the same sense that I made car payments or paid the bill at a restaurant.

I became disabled six years ago. I suffered increasing, chronic, pain, following several abdominal surgeries, and was prescribed medication for that pain that would have, alone, rendered me unable to do my job. In addition, I had been diagnosed in the previous year (finally!) with Narcolepsy, which I had almost certainly been suffering from since my mid teens (I think I was 38 at diagnosis). I was taking medications for the Narco to keep me awake, but the pain meds were working against them. In short, after a healthy and productive life, I was suddenly disabled.

I’d been living with undiagnosed Narcolepsy for 20+ years, getting by on coffee, cigarettes, and jabbing myself in the leg with my mechanical pencils during meetings. That alone should demonstrate my work ethic and endurance. (If you don’t know anything about Narcolepsy that you haven’t picked up from movies and TV, you don’t know anything about Narcolepsy. The most common illustration used is to imagine yourself doing ordinary tasks after being awake for 72 hours straight – every day of your life.) I’d started experiencing some of the aches and pains of aging, had chondromalacia in both knees, that my doctor attributed to my constant bike riding(?), and had some neck problems that might have been due to a car accident (hit by a drunk driver, a wine rep on company time, and didn’t have the sense to get a shyster doc/lawyer combo to hook me up for life). All those things were an annoyance, but I was a very independent person, so I ignored them and kept doing my job.

My company was privately insured, but used an insurance company to evaluate claims, and it turns out that they used one that was in the top five for “bad faith” claims. I was in touch with the human resources department, my manager, and the claims person constantly, so they knew that I was at the Mayo Clinic, on my own dime, seeking a diagnosis and treatment, on the day that they denied my claim, fired me, and cut off my health insurance.

My only option was to take them to court, but disability insurers have a strange legal protection. It wasn’t enough to prove that I was actually disabled, backed up by my doctor’s opinion and documentation. I would have to prove that the claim denial was “arbitrary and capricious”. In other words, I’d have to prove the claim adjuster’s *motivation*, rather than my own physical condition.

They were all pushing me toward Social Security from the very beginning, and I finally had to give in and go through the government meat grinder, which has become so screwed up that I only just won my appeal in court and am still waiting for a damn check. Six years later.

I didn’t want to be on the government dole. I’ve worked and saved my whole life so I could take care of myself and never dreamed that I’d be one of those bottom feeders, but the whole system is designed to push people into that corner; even if I’d been able to afford a lawyer, the law was stacked against me. My so-called disability insurance was useless paper, by design, and all of my efforts to do the right and responsible things were invested in a sham. I’d had the nerve to feel superior to people who had, in my former opinion, been the victims of their own poor planning. I bet that a lot of you here feel that too. I hope you never find out the truth about your own security nets – at least, not the way that I did.

I’m not, in any shape or form, stumping for government care. I’m pissed that I never knew, or fought, a system that was set up to push me into SSDI, by making the legal recourse against bad faith claims so convoluted and out of reach for people already struggling just to get dressed by themselves, let alone fight long, expensive, legal battles. I dream of suing their asses off, and winning the money that’s rightfully mine, and I’m a serious grudge holding, tilting at windmills, fight the power sort of person. At least, I was, but they wore me down when I was at my weakest, and I’m looking forward to government checks and the wonders of Medicare. Yay.

And for the GOOD lawyers out there, why don’t you raise your respectability with the rest of the country and push internally for tort reform! If lawyers would take the lead here, we would all save a bundle in medical insurance and would stand even stronger against Obamacare!