Health Problems Surgeries Hospitalizations: Fill & Download for Free

Personally? My reaction is “Thanks for Nothing.”I’m 42 years old, with a B.A. in English and a J.D. (law degree).I’m also homeless and completely broke.The only surgery I’ve ever had was to remove my wisdom teeth. I’ve never actually spent any time in a hospital beyond a few hours in an emergency room. I’ve never been seriously injured, never broken a bone beyond a minor break in my foot when I was a kid.Yet my medical costs per year are well over $5,000.Why?Well, because when I was born, I was born with a malfunctioning brain that would eventually end up as severe depression, massive anxiety, and autism, plus a little dash of things like ADHD & OCD and God only knows what else.I’ve never actually been completely diagnosed because I can’t afford it.I have to see my GP several times a year just to monitor the effects of all the medications I’m on. Medications which, without discounts, run in the $300-$400 range per month.Remember what I said above? Very well educated, but still homeless, jobless, & broke.How does that happen?Easy.Untreated or undertreated mental health problems.Why is that?Because I can’t afford treatment and/or medications.See, the problem isn’t necessarily one big sudden medical problem. For every surprise cancer diagnosis, there’s plenty of people out there whose day-to-day, non-catastrophic but major health problems keep them not only short of money, but at a permanent disadvantage when it comes to being productive members of society.Basically, your “plan” would cover me having a massive mental breakdown every six months requiring hospitalisation, but won’t cover the medications & treatment that would not only prevent that, but help me actually get & hold a job where I can positively contribute to the overall economy.So, yeah….. “Thanks for nothing” is about as accurate as it gets, from my perspective.

Two years ago, my 52 year old “baby” sister started peeing blood-lots of it—and based on her CT scan, 3 doctors told her she had a kidney cancer, called renal cell carcinoma. The prognosis was not good, so they immediately scheduled her for surgery to remove her kidney, her ureter, and part of her bladder. She has four kids and was freaking out, of course. Something seemed off, so I pressed her to get another opinion and made her an appointment at a teaching hospital. She had to cancel her surgery and wait with gritted teeth for a few weeks, wondering if her cancer was spreading. When she saw the new doctor (God bless him!), he ordered more tests and discovered that she had a blood vessel abnormality in her kidney, called an arteriovenous malformation, that was fixed with an outpatient procedure. Today, she has both kidneys and owes me free drinks for life ;-) We will always be grateful for that last doctor’s thoughtful and thorough approach.

Yes.My husband was injured in an on the job accident 22 years ago. For close to 20 years he was considered 100% disabled. To note how disabled he was, he got his disability approved on the first try. During those 20 years he racked up 10’s of thousands of dollars in medical bills that his insurance, that workers comp and that any other insurance we had flat refused to cover. He even accumulated bills through the VA system. Yes they DO charge the vets, even those with no income but SSDI.Only in the last 5 years, with the coming of President Obama’s medical insurance changes and the change in my home state's insurance laws did he finally get to the point where he could safely go to a hospital and expect to get treatment without assuming we’d get another huge crushing load of debt to pay. I’ve paid off close to 150K in medical bills for his treatments that should have been paid by his insurance and weren’t due to 100 & 1 loopholes the insurance managed to get seduced into the laws. I owe yet another 100k and will, eventually I guess get it paid off. About the time I die of old age. Retirement? Me? HAHAHAHAHA.This last year, after all these years, he finally was able to get surgery and now, finally, is able to get off disability and go back to work. The surgery that repaired his broken body wouldn’t have been allowed yet, except he developed another medical condition and his doctor smartly requested this new surgery as a fix for the new problem and got it accepted by the insurance. Prior to the affordable health care reforms our insurances were able to refuse to cover most of his needed treatments. Twenty F***king lost years because of that. I couldn’t raise the money and no hospital would touch him for surgery without payment up front for the full amount. If I didn’t have a family farm I am not at all sure where we’d have got food to eat many years our debt load has been so great for his medical bills.Do you have any idea how much money the country is losing because of this stupidity? Billions of dollars in lost revenues and destroyed lives because a few insurance stockholders investments are considered more valuable than the health and futures of the entire American population.