Getting Health Insurance
I wanted to write this much earlier today, but my computer was down until my daughter came over and got it working again. I have been computer-deprived for two days!
From the ready-for-anything-anytime person I once was, I have become a bore who likes to live with a routine. The past week has been anything but a routine. A week ago today my daughter Jane became ill enough to go to the ER 65 miles away. She has allergies, and a change in the wind or weather can cause problems that lead to serious illness. I drove her there, they kept her overnight. and I went back for her late the following afternoon. After getting her system back to normal, our greatest worry has been that she has no health insurance.
Jane works from home as a medical transcriptionist for two different companies. If one runs out of work, she can fall back on the other. She has been doing this for 15 years because it used to pay quite well. Then came outsourcing. She has had at least two companies outsource to India, and the pay went from 20 cents a line down to 8 1/2 cents. Some companies she has worked for offer health insurance, but employees must reach a high degree of speed to get it, and as she gets older with accompanying health issues, she has found it difficult to maintain the speed and still keep accuracy her main concern. She has found she must work the graveyard shift for the best results, but has reached an age where it is almost impossible to maintain the speed necessary for company-offered insurance. It’s a real Catch 22. The more you need health insurance, the less likely you are that you can get it.
Yesterday she remembered an insurance agent she used years ago to get insurance for her diabetic daughter. She called him and he had a plan for her – very expensive, but doable. She could be insured by September 1 if she signed up now. She and the agent agreed to meet at Tom’s Farms a halfway point from his office and where we live out here in the mountains east of San Diego. I went along to keep her company. It was about a three-hour drive.
Tom’s Farm is just about the most pleasant place you could find to wait for anyone. It reminds me of a more peaceful and laid-back Disneyland. We found a table on a porch by the pond where we could get a bite to eat and watch the people while we waited for the agent. There used to be live farm animals and a pond full of ducks and swans, but we didn’t see any yesterday – nor any feathers or excrement either. But there is a farmer’s market as well as other shops that still have a country flair. There are two rustic looking restaurants, a free carousel for the children, and lots of shady trees and attractive landscaping furnished with benches and tables and pleasant places to sit. The pond has a fountain spraying high into the air. The long shadows of late afternoon made everything more beautiful than I had remembered.
There is a small bandstand by the water where a guy with a guitar, a drummer, a pianist, and a singing lady provided upbeat music that was somewhere between jazz and soul. Whatever it was, it inspired a very small tot, who seemed to have escaped from his mother, to dance. He had a lot of good moves, and was very entertaining. He had an equally lively older brother who wasn’t watching out for him as much as providing a focal point for the little one to go back to instead dancing himself into the pond.
The insurance agent didn’t keep us waiting for more than an hour. He had brought his wife with him. Maybe he thought he might need protection from two single, if older, ladies that he didn’t really know. It didn’t take long for Jane to sign her working life away for the years until she can get Social Security benefits. At least this policy is portable and not dependent on whom she works for. We left in time to arrive home before midnight.
I am pleased to tell you that Jane has joined Gather. I think it was the poem that Darcey wrote and dedicated to her that did it. I am glad she did, because her job working at home is a lonely business. All you friendly people I have met at Gather have made my life so much more interesting that I know she will find the same is true for her.
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Comments: 14
Lynn - Jane commented on my Soldier's Grass offering, and you can click on Jane S. She hasn't posted anything yet, and may not find time to write articles, but she can write very well.
And, of course, I'm glad that you're back among us! :)
I do wonder if the subsidized insurance to reduce costs would be more effective for people...
It would be simple if we would do it... just pass a law that every American Corporation must pay the U. S. minimum wage regardless of where their company is located or where they farm out the work. If we want true Global economy (which I'm not sure we do) then we should be willing, as the supposed greatest super power on earth, to lift other countries to our standard of living.
Though why any other country would want this shallow, low quality, high priced, consumerism we call a life is beyond me.
Does anyone else miss the days when craftsmen took pride in their work? Furniture was made of real wood at nearby small factories, healthy and safe food was grown at nearby family farms, affordable and safe health care was given by the local doctor, who wasn't above making a house call to save bringing the germs to his office, and if you called the plumber a polite office person answered on the second ring and made an appointment which the plumber kept? I could go on, but you know what I mean.
Dan - When people worked for the same company all their lives, it made sense for the employers to subsidize their worker's insurance. Now days, when you don't know from day to day if your company will be bought out and restructured ( firing half the employees) it is better to have portable insurance. Jane's will cost her almost $700 a month just for herself. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of surgury and hospital stays that are likely to happen to her. I think congress could do something to control the greed of pharmaceutical companies. There is something evil about the sickness industry being for profit.
Sandy - Those craftsman are still out there, but cost an arm and a leg. So many businesses seem to be getting greedier and greedier. I think landlords are a very big offenders. They raise rents even when they bought the property at a small fraction of current prices, and havn't made any improvements. In 1946 I could have bought a house for the price of renting a medim priced apartment now. In 1964 my husband and I bought a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in a good part of town, just blocks from the beach, for $12,500. We sold it 13 years later for more than twice the price. Now it and other houses in the same tract sell for $500,000. Inflation like that should be illegal. The two navy bases there have closed so there are fewer jobs.
Back in '87 when I priced my health insurance, as I owned my own business then, Alstate which was around the middle, would have cost me between $700.00 to $750.00, I don't remember the exact cost, which was around $400.00 more than the average person.
Darcey.
I am glad you had a nice time getting insurance, Tom's Farm sounds like fun, wish we were there!
I think health care should be subsidized by the government because there are a lot of people who fall between the cracks through little or no fault of their own. It is a form of genocide to let people die for lack of simple preventative medicine in what is, or has been, the richest democracy in the world. The burden is falling on the emergency rooms of hospitals that are swamped with people who have no health insurance. ERs are swamped and working close to capacity every day. Can you imagine the pandemonium that will take place the next time a killer epidemic strikes? Hospitals need more subsidizing, and pharmaceutical corporations less.