Chronic Illness in America — Hope Not You

Amer­ica (The US, or more appro­pri­ately, the United States of Amer­ica) likes to believe itself to be the most advanced civ­i­liza­tion of today’s world. While there is much to praise about the nation of our cit­i­zen­ship, the state of its dis­tri­b­u­tion of health­care to its cit­i­zens is not wor­thy of praise nor is it what should be expected of one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.

This crit­i­cism does not apply to the state of devel­op­ment and exis­tence of health­care. With the excep­tion of a few areas where spe­cial inter­est groups have stopped or slowed devel­op­ment or avail­abil­ity of cer­tain pro­ce­dures for polit­i­cal rea­sons, the US has one of the world’s very best health­care systems.

Where the sys­tem totally breaks down is if a per­son suf­fers from a chronic ill­ness and is not of extreme per­sonal wealth or lucky enough to be cov­ered by a com­pre­hen­sive insur­ance plan. This break­down is espe­cially true for those indi­vid­u­als whose chronic ill­ness inter­feres with their abil­ity to work. Such peo­ple very often quickly con­sume what­ever sav­ings they may have built up while they have been able to work. Too many Amer­i­cans hold the false impres­sion that gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies like Medicare fully cover such peo­ple. Under Medicare, co-payments for indi­vid­ual med­ica­tions can run as high as thou­sands of dol­lars per month. Many phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies offer assis­tance to peo­ple who require their med­ica­tions but can­not afford to pay for them but often do not offer this assis­tance to peo­ple who are on pro­grams like Medicare.

We are among the lucky. Lucky on many counts. Because we have had access to per­sonal and fam­ily funds and have been well insured in the past, we have received state-of-the art care for our health con­di­tions. Because of this, our health is much bet­ter than it might oth­er­wise have been. But this could quickly change. While we have a mod­est amount saved to sup­port retire­ment at some point in the future, it does not take too much imag­i­na­tion to con­ceive of sce­nar­ios where health con­di­tions would totally deplete these funds. Our cur­rent source of finan­cial sup­port is depen­dent upon a large US cor­po­ra­tion. It also does not take much imag­i­na­tion to con­ceive of sce­nar­ios where this finan­cial sup­port could van­ish in the future.

When we think about just how quickly we could move from enjoy­ing the ben­e­fits of one of the best health­care sys­tems in the world to being almost totally denied access to that health­care sys­tem, can we still call it one of the best health­care sys­tems? No.

A health­care SYSTEM must sup­port EVERYONE. The US health­care sys­tem neglects too many to be a good health­care sys­tem. Time for our soci­ety to stop being an exclu­sion­ary society.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too