Showing posts with label Pennsylvania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pennsylvania. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Martin in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Martin in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
Martin has been out-of-work since last year. “Obviously I have no insurance,” he said. He has insulin-dependent diabetes and gets some healthcare through the Pennsylvania ACCESS card. He explained that, “If I go back to work, however, I’ll lose my medical care.”
“That's a disincentive to work,” I said.
“Sure is … I need to stay under twenty hours a week to get medical care. If I work more, there’s no job, no way I could pay for the healthcare and medicines. I can’t just drop the insulin.”
Jim in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Jim in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
“I would call myself a fiscal conservative,” Jim told me as we sat together discussing healthcare in his living room. “I believe that health savings accounts, HSAs, and patient involvement in the decisions will be important to bring costs under control.” He added that in his experience, once health benefits are provided, it’s “very difficult to backtrack.”
He’s worked in government for 32 years and is currently retired. “Personally, I think the government plan, if made available to all, would work well. I think that would be easy to implement. It allows choice, there’s already a mechanism to collect premiums. and there could be some income tiering.”
Jo in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Jo in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
“I think that it’s possible to have a very basic plan as a public good.” Jo told me she’s seen examples of that and she “believes it’s a good use of taxpayer money.” But she also realizes how it could get out-of-hand. “It all depends on how and what ‘basic’ is defined as,” she said. “Sometimes that’s too abstract.”
Gloria in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Gloria in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
Gloria is the owner of Hollinshead grocery. She told me how the grocery, a family business, has been in Harrisonville for over a hundred years. Being self-employed, She hasn’t had health coverage for more than twenty years, ever since her husband’s company went out of business. “It’s just too expensive to get insurance being self-employed,” she told me.
Three years ago, her husband had a heart attack and died. She explained that paying for his care, even in the midst of grieving, was not easy. “A Harrisburg doctor accepted a ‘payment plan’,” and she also applied for Hill-Burton funds to pay for testing and other hospital costs. “Things were not easy,” she added, with a touch of melancholy.
Mike in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Mike in Harrisonville, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
Mike, a customer at Hollinshead’s Grocery, lost his job at Caterpillar in February and now is without insurance. “COBRA was much too expensive,” he said. His unemployment check was $325 a week and health coverage cost over $400 a month. His children, “fortunately,” he told me, are covered through the state (ACCESS program). He seemed calm as he explained this predicament.
“My wife just got diagnosed with Lyme disease, though—a tick-bite right here in our back yard.” Eyes perked up among the others sitting about the grocery. He told me, “We’re paying cash for the lab bill.” It had originally been $307 but they were able to get it discounted to $187. “The doctor's bill was $80—and that's just for the diagnosis,” he added. “For the actual treatment, we’re dependin’ on free samples.”
Monday, July 20, 2009
Eric in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Eric in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
I met with Eric in Jim’s living room (at the home where I stayed that night). Jim had invited several neighbors to stop by for a discussion of healthcare reform and Eric was gracious enough to share his story with me.
First, he does not have health insurance. He looked into it, reviewed the policies from three companies and saw that there was essentially no difference among them. “It was 80/20 coverage and no doctors were covered,” he told me. The premiums started off at $300 a month and went up to $900 a month within a year. “Worse than the cable company!” And so he dropped the coverage.
As it turns out, Eric did have a serious health issue last year—a pituitary adenoma (a form of benign, but still very dangerous, brain tumor). One morning he woke up nearly blind—all he could see was a tiny pin-prick of light (an extreme form of a condition called ‘tunnel vision’). He had himself taken to the emergency room.
To make a long story short, he was treated at UPMC. He told me “Hershey refused to talk because he had no insurance.” Being without insurance, he now, after all was said and done, owed $160,000. He was able to make deals with the doctors but the hospital, he told me, “was never cooperative—a monster to deal with. And there was no negotiation.” He told me about his ongoing struggles with the hospital.
“And the billing was so strange," he added. As someone who checks things out carefully, he told me how an MRI at UPMC cost $7,000 but the same scan, on the same machine, cost $2,000 in the nearby town of Altoona. “And a single Tylenol pill cost $10! It’s a crazy system.”
Kay in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Kay in Bedford, Pennsylvania
Originally uploaded by walk4healthcare
Kay’s a part-owner of a small business—all of three people. Because of the high cost of health insurance, the deductibles, and ‘all that,’ “they’ve got no discretionary income,” she told me. They’re with Highmark and the premium went up $100 a month within the past few months alone. Her husband has had two heart surgeries (done at the Cleveland Clinic). The cost was $4,000 a day but they ended up paying $700. “That was a relief,” she said. “But we're lucky. We can afford healthcare insurance—barely—but that leaves us with no extra money.” Clearly up-to-date on various healthreform proposals, she added, “It would be nice if I could deduct it as a tax credit.”
“But here’s the real problem,” Kay continued. “If my husband—or I—couldn’t work then we wouldn’t be able to maintain the income to pay for any insurance. How will we be able to pay for health insurance when we actually need it most? That’s what doesn’t make sense.”
I was readying to leave when Kay interrupted. “One more thing. I think much of these premium monies are being wasted.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I went to a Pirates game and they were giving out free bobblehead dolls.” Guess who sponsored all that?”
“Who?”
“Highmark. That’s where health insurance premiums go—to advertising.”
And so my experience came full circle as I recalled the giant Highmark billboards scattered among Pittsburgh’s downtown when I had been there four days earlier.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Special Dispatch: Ryan's Story
Ryan is a young American. 24 years old, sporting an unassuming t-shirt and buzz cut, he exudes a personality simultaneously reserved and forthright. He has a gracious smile, offered with a twist of the head but then when he looks at you, with a piercing gaze, his face turns serious. As a writer, he seeks to deeply understand people, yet some things, like healthcare insurance, elude even his keen comprehension.
Brought up in a family who never had health insurance, Ryan is, nevertheless, a man with energetic, ambitions. After an early honorable discharge from the Army—for medical reasons—and a fruitless search for a job, he is working to finish his first novel, Ever Street Road, a parable, as he calls it, for the choices in life that one makes. Yet, in this great country, bursting with infinite possibility, Ryan has few, if any, choices. Infinitude meets finitude—this is
The future is but an illusion. Not knowing whether there will be healthcare for all or only healthcare for some, Ryan and I, sharing dinner, are focused on the present and the past. This is the only thing we truly know. The future, a future where the young ambitions of earnest, yet thwarted souls, might reach their full potential, is only a dream. Reality is how I met Ryan and what brought him to run up the hill to meet me on US 30 as 18-wheelers thundered past.
Just east of
A young man, gasping for breath, came up beside me. Cars rushed by and instinctively motioned him towards the narrow shoulder.
“Are … are you Doctor Gurel?” he asked, wide-eyed, disbelieving. I was on the phone, still working feverishly to arrange transport of my bag. Too tired to be surprised, I smiled at him, and nodded. “I was following you on Twitter and … and I just had to come and meet you.” I hung up the phone, and out of habit continued on forward, as the young man joined me. “I’m Ryan, Ryan Trump,” he added.
“Oh yes! From Facebook!”
“Yes,” he said, his face twisting, searching for words to describe a situation for which there was no precedent. “Wow, I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“That I met you here.”
I chuckled. “Crazy, isn’t it?” Ryan and I had exchanged some e-mails during the past few weeks on Facebook, and it was strange indeed that an entirely electronic friendship had materialized here on the not-so-isolated
And so we talked—talked with amazement about the GPS tracking technology that had brought Ryan to my very spot. We talked about healthcare. But I had to interrupt him. “Ryan, I have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“My motel is about seven miles up, in Irwin. I have no pick-up to get there. Could you help out?”
“That’s the least I can do!”
I smiled weakly. Deliverance, in the form of Ryan Trump, shy but forthright, gracious but ambitious, had arrived. I was grateful for the wonders of technology and even more for the grace of initiative and real, not electronic, fellowship.
And so, after a couple of hours of back-and-forth driving, Ryan and I delivered the suitcase and myself to the motel in Irwin.
But that was the present. The following evening I had dinner with Ryan and we talked about the past. The present and the past: while this is what we know, we spoke out of hope for the future. A future with healthcare for all, and not just for some. A future where the imagined infinitude of possibilities cross with the crushing reality of no possibility.
“My family has never had health insurance,” Ryan told me. “My father worked in maintenance at the hospital for 36 years. And we never had health insurance but we could get care through the hospital.”
“That’s good,” I replied.
“Then the hospital closed, back in 2006, and he got laid off … but he was close to retirement anyway.”
“So what do you do now?”
“It’s difficult. My mom’s got a heart condition, had a heart attack back in 2000. You know it could always happen again. She’s got four types of drugs.”
“How do you pay for it?”
“It’s all out-of-pocket.”
“But you told me that you had troubles with the bank.”
“That’s just the way it goes—you pay for the medications when you can.”
I shook my head. “And how about for you? What’s it like to not have insurance?”
Ryan, who would usually look straight at me with those forthright, almost aggressive eyes, glanced down. “Well, you got aches and pains, but you think, ‘do I deal with the pain or do I go to the hospital and suffer accumulated debt? I’m 24 years old and my credit score is probably garbage. Can’t do anything in life with that, you know.”
I figured, listening between the lines, that Ryan had, in fact, gotten some healthcare, and the ‘accumulated debt’ he had referred to was real. “How’s the asthma?” I asked. (This was the reason for the honorable, medical discharge from the service).
“Oh, that’s not too bad. But there was this other situation.”
“What was that?”
Ryan thought for a moment, then looked up. “Well, I had a lump,” he said, pointing below the table.
24 years old young man, I realized that he was likely referring to testicular cancer—a condition made widely known by Lance Armstrong’s experience, and survival.
“Did you get it checked out?”
“Well, I was holding off for the longest time. But it was quickly getting bigger.”
My heart sank, but the fact of the rapid enlargement, encouragingly suggested to me that it wasn’t cancer. “And?”
“So I did go to the doctor eventually.” Ryan smiled and sighed. “He said it was some sort of hydrocele.”
“Oh yes, that’s good news.”
“They did an ultrasound … and, of course, I got all the bills. There was no way I could pay for them so I didn’t even open them up.”
An odd mix, a contradiction even, that with the wonderful news—namely that one did not have cancer—there came delivered a message of debt peonage that inspired even more despair than the dreaded diagnosis itself. It was almost as if the healthcare system itself was the cancer.
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