Health Care from a Variety of Perspectives - all involving ME!

As many of you know, I recently had eye surgery. VERY exciting. Particularly when I managed to "botch" the recovery and apparently blinked or squeezed my eye too tightly in my sleep the night after the surgery.

The wound "burped" or busted a stitch and I couldn't see once the bandage came off. This necessitated an emergency procedure wherein the Dr. stuck a needle in my eyelid to numb the eye and then casually telling me, "You won't feel any pain," proceeded to then insert a needle INTO my eye to inject a gel to help "re-pressurize" the eye. It was more upsetting, certainly psychologically, than the surgery itself!

Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, the whole thing was done on a pretty high quality level. I used to hear nothing but bad about Kaiser, but apparently they're now one of the better providers around--at least in terms of monstrously large HMOs. The folks I dealt with were all polite and professional, there were no snafus, and even though it was kind of distressing on one hand to see the factory-like efficiency with which they were serving folks, it was also kind of impressive.

My co-pay for surgery was $300, and the doctor has been cool about waiving the normal $25 co-pay I have for doctor's visits for all the follow-up check-ups I've had to have.

But, still, the whole episode reminded me (again) how it just WRONG, plain and simple to "commodify" health care. It's amazing that those stupid tea-baggers and others get in such a RAGE over "socialized medicine."

I also have the perspective of a quasi-small-business owner, since as the E.D. of a small non-profit, I have to deal with budgeting for health insurance for our eligible employees. Our policy is to provide a $400 monthly "allowance" for staff to select from a variety of health care plans. The plans have different co-pays and coverage and the monthly cost is tied to how comprehensive the coverage is and what your co-pays are.

At present, we do have about 4 choices of plans around/under $400, with a few that cost more and a few that cost less. But for an organization with a budget well under $1 million, spending nearly $5K annually for each employee's health insurance is quite a hit. But we do it coz god knows we're not in the non-profit world for the high salaries!

So as an employer, I have to deal with wanting to provide good health options for my staff, while also having to be cognizant of our bottom line & ability to serve as many youth as we can. As an employee, I have to deal with picking the best possible plan with my limited budget and trying to keep in mind the co-pays, coverage, etc. Finally, as a patient, I have to weigh not only the pros and cons of my health care options when I'm sick, but weighing whether I can even afford to get sick/go to the doctor in the first place in consideration of my co-pays.

And are any of these concerns going to go away after the recently enacted health care legislation? Pfft, hardly!

But I will give props to Obama and Pelosi for at least getting SOMETHING through; in our broken political system, that's a miracle in and of itself and will make it at least somewhat easier to tweak/add on to the system later.

Honestly, what I'm happiest about with the health care plan is that it so ENRAGES all those stupid, gap-toothed, slack-jawed, inbred, racists yokels who are so effing clueless they protest against their own best interests just because they can't stand having a black man as their president. HA!