Healthcare

I was just reading how Zoe Keating is using her platform to talk about how healthcare is failing us. I haven’t seen this yet. I’m going to look it up when I get home from work and can watch videos.

It is something that I have been thinking about a lot. With the affordable care website being kind of screwy I went for almost four years totally uninsured. I had a small snag this year and nearly lost my healthcare again. It is scary. The older I get the less willing I am to risk my health or just hope for the best. Jess had insurance. She had to pay out the butt for it for several years and only used it if she absolutely needed to. There were many times when she was hospitalized for one thing or another. Stuff that she should have been able to fight or stuff caused by her hidradenitis. She needed surgery to give her a 50% chance of getting better but with her insurance she would still be in a hole so deep she’d be paying forever. Not to mention that she couldn’t afford to be off work long enough to recover, if they even kept her job for her.

Finally she had a job that had decent insurance. She found a doctor that knew her illness and could help her. So she was trying to get her skin under control enough to have surgery because with years of not having proper treatment it was really bad. She worked with an awful woman who tried to tell her that she couldn’t take time off to go to doctor appointments anymore and was generally just awful to her. Lucky for her she worked in a place where her sister outranked the awful woman and could help to protect her to a point. She still was too sick she still got the blood clot that killed her.

I know there is no changing things. What happened is what happened and there is no going back no matter how much it tears out my insides. 

Still...

What if...

What if we lived in a place that when things started she could have afforded to go to the doctor? 

What if our jobs were all protected when we need to recover from surgeries? 

What if we didn’t have to hope for jobs with an older sister to protect us? 

What if she could have gone to the doctor again to find out why her legs cramped up so bad?

What if she could have gone to the hospital just one day sooner rather than waiting until it was an emergency because even with insurance she couldn’t really afford to pay to be there?

What if we didn’t have politicians playing sides since it doesn’t really effect them and instead just help make life livable? 

What if the whole system weren’t fucked?

Would I still have my best friend?