As students of Cal State Long Beach, we have access to the Student Health Center. If we are sick we make an appointment and see a nurse or a doctor.
But what about when we graduate? Is adequate health care affordable or even available?
Last month a series of reports done by the Los Angeles Times focused on the horrors of the uninsured and the nasty phrase “pre-existing condition” popped up.
Everyday, someone is denied health insurance because insurance companies can’t afford to insure the sick, or in many cases the “kinda” sick.
If you are not a part of a group plan, usually offered through employment, your only alternative is individual insurance. Individual insurance offers customers less coverage at a higher price.
These plans are easily manipulated because companies are not required to insure anyone. And if they choose to insure you — and after establishing insurance you find out you have some ailment — they can deem it pre-existing and drop your coverage.
The best health insurance option, besides being super rich, is a group plan. Under these plans, everyone is covered regardless of pre-existing conditions. The idea behind everyone being covered is that the medical bills will even out because the young and healthy are insured in the same pool as older folks. This way the group will be covered and the insurance companies still make money.
The profit lies within the well customer, not someone with a chronic disease such as asthma. If they would insure someone with asthma, for example, they would have to insure everyone with asthma. If the other insurance companies are still refusing to insure asthma patients, the one that does will lose major money.
Blue Shield of California went as far as to deny a healthy newborn baby, with a minor hip misalignment, insurance. The doctor explained that the problem would most likely fix itself and the only extra treatment was a couple of X-rays. Blue Shield refused to insure the baby until after the problem corrected itself. The parents had to pay more than $2,000 in regular healthy-baby doctor bills.
It feels like a Twilight Zone episode. It seems insurance is not even worth it sometimes. They have power to decide if you are a risk or not. If someday your doctor bills are more than they want to pay out, all they have to do is say, “Goodbye.” This forces us to live in fear of our own health insurance. Someday they might turn on you, deny coverage and stick you with the bill.
There is no law that makes insurance companies insure everyone. Unless you can manage to get into a group plan, you better hope you stay healthy.
Insurance companies are not going to get together someday and make a deal with each other to insure everyone. But we cannot continue to create a society where only healthy people can see a doctor. It just doesn’t make sense.
Insurance companies are a business trying to make money with no obligation to better society. That is where our government needs to step in.
Something has to be done about those of us who can’t afford health insurance, as well as for the ones who can but are deemed uninsurable.
Thousands of people dive into bankruptcy because they can’t afford insurance, become ill and can’t pay the bills. We cannot fix our financial crisis if everyday people are walking into the “Suffocation Ward.”
There are major holes in our health care system that must be fixed. There is no reason a healthy baby should be denied insurance only to be reinstated months later after its problem heals itself.
We deserve health insurance because we pay taxes, which we can’t pay if we’re too sick to work. We deserve health insurance because we’re American.
Serafina Costanza is a senior journalism major and the assistant opinions editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.
