Without mentioning a name or an employer, the Journal’s Linda Brinson writes about a friend who lost his job months after being diagnosed with mulitple myeloma:
Yes, he had been one of the ones to be laid off, with no warning. Even reading a matter-of-fact e-mail, you could tell that the insult hurt.
But there are also worse things than insults. “… I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in Feb and have been undergoing treatments to prepare me for an autologous stem cell transplant in Aug. …,” he wrote. “My benefits are good only to the end of this month (June), whereupon I will have to make the medical premium payments myself via COBRA…..
We’ve known about these problems for years, and done next to nothing about them. Washington politicians were arguing about health-care reform during the Clinton administration – that was back in the early 1990s. And now we have a whole stable of politicians who hope to be presidential candidates in 2008, talking about the need for health-care reform. Meanwhile, the number of Americans with no health insurance gets ever larger: The Census Bureau reported that 44.8 million Americans lacked health coverage in 2005.
Those who do have coverage feel the squeeze of steadily increasing costs and higher deductibles.
We’re slaves to our health-care costs, and one bad day away from disaster. Isn’t it time we did something?
No doubt that ‘something’ would be universal healthcare.
