Then you die from appendicitis. You figure you can't afford to go to the doctor so you don't - after all, it's just cramps. Then your appendix bursts and you're history.
You can't afford health care, so you don't get it.
Comprehensive health care is NOT available to everyone. Unless you consider "the ER" to be 'comprehensive'.
When a doctor's visit used to be $10, this wasn't an issue. Now that the CO-PAY is $50, it IS an issue.
Heaven forbid that you're born the way I was in 1962 - with a severe case of bilateral club feet. If born today, I could probably be rejected for insurance as having a 'pre existing condition' (since it would have been pre-natal). I can't imagine what the costs would be compared to what my adoptive mother did to pay for what she could back in the 1960s. I had surgery in 1968 to keep the physical therapy that I'd been though from being wasted (I would be been 're-crippled').
Back in the 80s, I tried to estimate the cost of SOME of what I went through and it was through the roof. It would certainly be even moreso today. Heck, in 1987, my older daughter was born completely 'normal' and it cost about $5,000 - from what I saw of the insurance statements. My younger daughter's costs were well into 6 figures because of defensive medicine when she had a small complication a few hours after she was born. Turned out (thankfully) nothing was wrong with her, but they wanted practically the entire medical staff in Boston on stand-by (and ambulanced her down from New Hampshire to Boston for just that purpose - because they didn't have a neo-natal surgery specialist on stand-by in NH in case a test went wrong).
Again, it all boils down to cost. Donna2 was quoting that health insurers only made a 3.3% margin. She also said that drug makers were at 16.5%.
Think about that - there's a 3.3% margin on top of the 16.5% margin when your treatment is pharmaceutical. It's layer after layer. At least the drug company actually MADE something.
Now, I was asked to back up my profit numbers. While the original report (20% profit hike) was something I saw in passing and cannot remember specifics, I decided to do a little research here. There's an article that summarizes last month's HHS report and links to a lot of supporting figures here:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/30417
Now the links in there seem to come from advocacy groups - that's what Google's giving me back - and I would expect these groups to be shouting the loudest.
Here's what one group going over the public financial records of the 5 largest health insurers said:
http://hcfan.3cdn.net/a9ce29d3038ef8a1e1_dhm6b9q0l.pdf
Now, granted I expect a slant from a group like this, but the numbers don't lie.
So here's the report from the Department of Health and Human Services:
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/...ers/index.html
And from The Daily Press:
So I was wrong. Profits weren't up 20%. They were up 56%. In the worst recession we've had since the Great Depression.
Like I've said all along, I wonder where the torch and pitchfork crowd has been. People scream when gas goes up 10 cents a gallon, but keep taking these red-hot pokers all the way up without complaining. I'd love to know how much my company is paying for my fairly decent health insurance - and how much they paid just 5 years ago. How much money am I *not* seeing?