I am a retired teacher with a Maine State Retirement pension. When I retired at 62, the only additional coverage I could get for which the MSR System would pay their share was Aetna, the company providing my health insurance at the time of retirement. I started paying about $350 a month from my own pocket, and the premium went up every year. At one points, I needed emergency surgery and was hospitalized for several days. When the bills started coming in, I discovered that I did not have the supplement plan I thought I had, but a catastrophic insurance plan that also provided some coverage for prescription drugs which I didn’t need. Aetna did not pay any of the co-pay expenses for the surgery and hospital stay. By this time my premium was up to about $450 a month. With the state’s share, my insurance was costing over $700 a month. Not only was I getting ripped off, the state was, too. As a taxpayer, I was cheated twice to pay for Aetna profits.
The whole experience was a nightmare with trying to figure out if I should blame the insurance company or the providers who kept harassing me with bills.
When the collection agency threatened me, I paid the bill to get some peace of mind, but my trust in some of the health care providers involved in that has never recovered, and I don’t intend to recover trust in for-profit insurance. It is foolish for any of us to trust our health to companies whose only motive is profit. And it is foolish to trust providers encouraged by the way they are paid to compromise quality of care and to waste money for unnecessary procedures.
When I signed up for Medicare in 2003, I dropped Aetna coverage and picked up an Advantage plan. I don’t trust them either. They start you out cheap and then increase the premiums by 100 percent or more every year. The first one stopped offering the product I had after about 2 years. The next one I had started out with a payment of $0 per month and increased the premium to $50 per month the first year. I don’t even know how to calculate that percentage. The one I have now bombards me every day with emails, phone calls, and snail mail purporting to educate me about their benefits, or requesting my time and energy filling out surveys, or making appointments with me for wellness checks that they don’t follow through with. These profit-driven companies are subsidized by the federal government, and we are cheated again.
When I first began my experience with a non-profit Blue Cross/ Blue Shield decades ago, our insurance life was simple and worry-free. Faced with a life-threatening illness of one child that went on for several years and involved several hospital stays, we all—the patient, his family, and the providers—could focus on the medical problems of the illness, not on what we would have to sacrifice to pay for the treatment. We need a payment system that returns us to that simplicity, effectiveness, and trust.
We need what virtually every other industrialized company has, a single-payer universal system which would create a more friendly business environment for Maine by decoupling insurance from employment; level the competitive playing field for workers in the global market where most of the developed world governments have some form of universal, single payer insurance; relieve personal stresses faced by individuals trying to get affordable insurance; reduce the costs of health care by removing profits of the insurance industry and the rest of the Health Care industrial complex, by negotiating prescription drug costs, and by other necessary measures. Not least of the benefits of a universal, single-payer system is simplifying the health-care system, which in itself would reduce costs to the entire system.
All it takes now is political will.
Please, cosponsor and support “The Medicare for All Act in the U.S. House (H.R. 3421) and U.S. Senate (S. 1655).”
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