Credit: Jim Morin.
I was the doctor on duty one night in August when the ambulance rushed a man into our Midwestern hospital ER. As I walked into the room, the scene was right out of TV. A nurse was trying to start an IV. Someone was running an EKG. A student had just put oxygen in the patient's nose. The room seemed crowded. The paramedics were sweating and slightly out of breath.
But my attention was on a pale, thin, fifty-five-year-old man sitting bolt upright on a gurney, clutching his chest and straining to breathe. Cold sweat dripped off his nose. I asked a couple of quick questions as I leaned him forward to listen to his lungs. Someone handed me his EKG showing an acute heart attack.
I slipped out of the room for a second to get the cardiologist on the phone. He would be right in, along with the rest of his team. But it was a Thursday night, late, and they were coming in from home. It would be at least twenty minutes until high-tech medicine could work its wonders, until the cardiologist could thread a thin plastic catheter into the patient's heart and put in a stent to open his blockage.
I was back to the room in a flash, and he looked no better. We gave him intravenous nitroglycerin, morphine, and powerful blood thinners. He began to look less frightened and some color crept back into his face. We still had a few minutes before they would be ready for him in the cardiac catheterization lab.
Just then I became aware of a woman quietly sobbing in a chair in the corner of the room, probably his wife. I walked over toward her and, as I neared, I reached out to touch her shoulder. She suddenly turned a fierce face up at me, saying: "When he told you he'd been having pain for two hours, he was lying! He's been having chest pains for the last two weeks!"
She didn't let up: "We were in the ER six months ago with his chest hurting, and they told him to see his cardiologist, but we don't have any insurance. They won't see him again without cash up front! What are we supposed to do?"
Her voice rising, she added: "And you know what else? They're suing us in small claims court right now over the bill from our last ER visit!"
Here was this poor woman, in my ER, not only deathly afraid that she might lose her husband tonight, but also afraid that whether he lived or died they might face an impossibly huge medical bill and lose their house, their car, everything.
The patient was a self-employed house painter, and he'd had a previous heart problem. Self-employed and a pre-existing condition -- in America today with those two strikes, you are out. There is no way to afford health insurance. Is the Affordable Care Act going to fix this?
The Affordable Care Act and the Health Care LobbyThe Affordable Care Act (ACA) faces an uncertain future. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in August ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional. Judge Hull, who cast the deciding vote, was a Clinton appointee. The verdict states:
This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.
The ACA was essentially written in the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Max Baucus. The actual author was his chief health care aide, Liz Fowler. Her job before working for Baucus? Vice president of WellPoint/Anthem/Blue Cross, the country's largest health insurer.
President Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House on March 23, 2010. Credit: Creative Commons/Keith Ellison.
The health insurance industry played both sides against the middle during the congressional debate. While publicly claiming to be in favor of reform, they secretly funneled millions to front groups and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which fought the bill tooth and nail. What the insurers wanted most out of the deal was the individual mandate -- a federally enforced requirement that all Americans buy their defective products, with taxpayer-financed subsidies for those who couldn't afford the premiums. What they wanted least were regulatory burdens that might limit their profitability.
Not being able to buy insurance if you are sick is one of the catch-22 aspects of our crazy system. In the eyes of insurance bureaucrats, it seems that life itself is a pre-existing condition. The ACA's ban on the use of pre-existing conditions to deny insurance coverage is scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Preventing that will be the next target of their lobbying fury.
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