In 2004, my father, a former FDIC banker and “troubleshooter” within the private retail banking industry, declared bankruptcy. A man who spent the better part of his adult life fixing banks after the Texas Mortgage Crisis of the 80’s found his own finances so devastated that he gave his house to the state to pay his creditors and started from scratch at 62 years old.
My mother had Lupus. She was always on high doses of Prednisone (40mg+). Long-term use has been associated with cancer. One of my first memories that I can remember is driving to MD Anderson with my mother from Port Arthur when I was five, and being in awe of Houston’s intricate by-passes and highway structures, in the same way I was fascinated with her illness. I was reading at a third grade level at that age, and my favorite magazine was my mother’s copies of Psychology Today (the illustrations!) and I loved her diagnostic and anatomical books from college (she was a Speech Pathologist). I would ask her the nurses and oncologists about the procedures as I was left in the waiting room. Was she getting an MRI? Could I see it? How much of her breast would they take? Will it happen to me? These were all questions I blithely asked as I played with my She-Ra dolls, and read Calvin and Hobbes. She went on to have breast cancer a second time when I was 10, and bone cancer when I was 14. Illness was just part of the landscape growing up.
We eventually moved to Bryan (where my mother continued her treks to Houston for check-ups) and then to El Paso. A few months after we moved here, my mother’s kidneys failed. I essentially lived at transplant clinic during the summer, reading to her has she received dialysis. I spent weeks at my best friend’s house while she prepared for surgery. I eventually moved in with her cousin and aunt in LA as her sister donated a compatible organ. Whether Prednisone took her kidneys, or maybe the Lupus, itself. We’ll never know.
My father was not a wealthy man. He made a great salary- over $55K+ benefits in the 80’s in El Paso, but it was very apparent to me as a kid that even though he was a bank VP and both my parents worked, I was not allowed the same frivolities my friends of a lower income were. I always wore off-label. Or hand-me-downs. There were always fights about finances. Money was an issue in my home. Because keeping my mother alive was draining my father dry.
To compound this were multiple lawsuits with her insurance company. It seemed like they were in court for years before their insurance company finally settled.
Keeping her alive cost about $650/month in premiums (in the 80’s). Their plan covered 60% until deductible was met ($5,000 deductible), and 80% after. The company had the discretion to deny coverage for anything that was considered “pre-existing.” Given that she had Lupus virtually anything could be considered pre-existing. Her kidney transplant was the subject of their biggest lawsuit, with Aetna refusing to pay for her transplant on the basis that her kidney failure was caused by the pre-existing condition (SLE), and not exacerbated by Prednisone (as was argued by her attorney and her nephrologist). Aetna eventually settled, because neither party could definitively prove their case, but had my parents lost, they would have been on-the-hook for an additional $200,000 in hospital fees from Cedars Sinai. Her medication after the transplant exceeded $2500/month through Stadtlanders, a reduced-price mail-order firm who catered to the chronically ill. As healthcare costs rose, so did his premiums and her med costs. When her body did eventually succumb to complete organ failure and sepsis- he was saddled with over $100,000 of hospital debt after insurance covered 80%. This was after her Nephrologist/Internist dramatically reduced his charges for her last two months in his care.
I turned 17 while she was entombed in ICU, and shortly after her death I graduated from high school and moved out to spare my father the expense. I couldn’t afford to go to any of the schools where I had been accepted. Getting to New England or New York was a financial impossibility, and my father’s credit was so fucked by the debt that private loans to cover the move and sustain me until my Stafford Loans kicked in were unimaginable. So I stayed here. I worked full-time and went to UTEP. My father spent the next eight years struggling to pay down the debt. He payed off the physicians and hospital with low/no interest credit cards, and consolidated the debt, moving it from card to card to keep the interest at 0%-2%, and closing the accounts after their interest rates went up. This worked fine until my father was laid off. He had left banking in the early 90’s to work for a maquilla. The layoff affected him in the worst way possible. He spent over a year trying to find a new job until he had completely drained his 401K. And so it was that he gave up. Cashed in his chips and walked away from the table with nothing. At 62 years old he moved into the home of his nearly 90-year-old mother- his childhood home. He was able to rebuild. He finally found a new job, and took care of his mother until her death from dementia in 2007, and was able to start drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits.
So what’s the point of this sad, sad tale of financial ruin?
Is this the country we want? Is this America? Conservatives like to go on the death panel trip. No, a death panel is where you have to decide if caring for the person you love is worth every dime you make, and possible bankruptcy, or whether you and your family resign themselves to an early death. I grew up within the healthcare debate- seeing it from a very intimate perspective, and the rhetoric revolving around it really disgusts me.
We had an opportunity a couple of years ago to finally have Single Payer- socialized medicine- in this country after decades of being left at the mercy of the healthcare market while other developed nations provided a human right to their citizens through tax dollars spent not on the Military Industrial Complex, but public health. But no. We’ve spent too much on two wars and propping up Pakistan’s public graft sector for that. We got a compromise. A public/private partnership that everyone seems to hate. None of us know how this new public/private partnership will work out in the end. Will health-insurance rates ever reach the kind of bottom that auto-insurance rates have since States made it mandatory? I doubt it. But something had to be done. There’s no reason why people like my father, who did everything right, should lose everything.
I have my own health issues now, and for the first time in years, I will be seeking out health insurance after being so discouraged by rates that I stopped making calls to agents. Once again on the inside looking out. I’ll let you all know what my rates look like, as someone who’s “high risk” with “pre-existing conditions”. But I won’t lie. If it looks like things are worse. If rates are too high, and I have to pay the tax, if my health starts to deteriorate- I have family in Canada who are willing to sponsor us. I may find myself in Toronto in the next few years. I’ll miss the sun and the chile, and it will feel weird being around Anglos again, and not defaulting to Spanish at the grocery store. But at least my husband will be able to find pants that fit really tall, skinny guys, and I won’t have to worry about a massive flare up putting our family in debt for the rest of our lives.
But I want to know your sad tales of healthcare gone awry. We need to share these to drive the point home to Congress that everyone is affected by this, and going back to the old way of doing business is not an option.
