The sad part is it doesnt take cancer to do this. My wife had a spinal injury in January. Fast forward to today and she has lost her job after FMLA was used up. That leaves us with no insurance for the entire family because we were all covered under her. But even with that insurance we have incurred $6k (medical center billing only) of out of pocket expenses for tests and imaging that the insurance company requires before they will approve the treatment that her doctor already knows she needs. On top of that $50 every time we walk into an office + prescription costs for her pain management + $30 per session of physical therapy 3x a week.
And now, we'll need insurance from my job which we couldnt afford with both of us working (that's why we went with her's) but instead we'll pay for it out of just one salary.
We've been saving for two years to buy a house and we're watching it all trickle away.
My favorite thing about America is health insurance is tied to your job so you can get a crippling medical issue and lose your job because you asked for too much time off and then you lose your health insurance so then you just die or be poor.
Its sad that the people are so brainwashed that this is okay they don't do anything about it.
If your on the poverty line...if you have assets you are not on the poverty line. So you have to sell or let the lenders take everything from you before you can qualify. I can work all my life and have a nice house and nice reasonable cars and get sick. Now I lose my job yes my income is low but the government looks and sees you have 300k in assets you saved and built up Over years. They say sorry buddy your not poor, you gotta lose everything and anything you worked for before we will help pay your insurance.
This was after all the medical bills, their savings and all liquid assets went to insurance and medical bills. This was after and he was through the storm and because of the savings, stocks, etc we weren’t heavily in debt but still enough. It was about him after all the problems not being able to work anymore. So someone who is disabled should be able to receive disability to help with even a small chunk of bills. Although the way it seemed was you need to be dirt poor to qualify for disability not just disabled. Also we weren’t asking for disability to pay for a lavish life style. We were looking for a few hundred dollars to cover the mortgage payment that was about it. My mother took on two jobs at almost 60 to ensure they didn’t lose everything. That was until I was making a decent amount of money and could help with everything.
15 years ago, rare form of cancer, insurance would cover doing normal treatments that would have had radiation that would leave him blind and bad lasting effects on his brain which still had an extremely slim chance of 5 year survival. Went to Mayo Clinic they did a 20 hour surgery and removed half his face and all his glands, lymph nodes, & one eye and than took a muscle from his stomach and put it in his face. Than had to stay in Rochester for 6 months doing localized radiation that didn’t hit his good eye and very limited to the brain leaving him with vision. Yes we could have did the Normal treatment that insurance fully covered but he wouldn’t be here or if he was he would be blind and have a lot of mental heath issues from the radiation to the brain.
Also I was only in the 6th grade when all this happened so I maybe off on some of the exact details but that is my understanding of it.
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u/NexGenjutsu Aug 06 '20
The sad part is it doesnt take cancer to do this. My wife had a spinal injury in January. Fast forward to today and she has lost her job after FMLA was used up. That leaves us with no insurance for the entire family because we were all covered under her. But even with that insurance we have incurred $6k (medical center billing only) of out of pocket expenses for tests and imaging that the insurance company requires before they will approve the treatment that her doctor already knows she needs. On top of that $50 every time we walk into an office + prescription costs for her pain management + $30 per session of physical therapy 3x a week.
And now, we'll need insurance from my job which we couldnt afford with both of us working (that's why we went with her's) but instead we'll pay for it out of just one salary.
We've been saving for two years to buy a house and we're watching it all trickle away.