As a young, self-employed writer and sometime-musician, I had no health insurance. If I got sick, I waited it out. If I hurt myself, I hoped for the best. Bicycling home one afternoon from a part time job — when you’re a young person in the arts, you almost always have a part-time job — I was hit by a car and the middle finger on my right hand was cut off. Bad luck. But the good luck was that the finger was jammed down into my hand so I didn’t lose it somewhere on the road. Two specialists were called to the hospital to reattach the finger. When they saw my mangled hand, one said, “Oh, this’ll be interesting.” I convinced them to use local anesthetic so I could watch them operate. They set up mirrors to give me a better view. Opinion Because I didn’t have the money to pay the various hospital, surgical, and laboratory fees, I soon had bill collectors knocking at my door. I explained that I was waiting to see if the driver’s insurance company would pay. As time passed, the bill collectors grew more threatening. I contacted a lawyer who agreed to represent me at no cost, taking only a percentage of whatever compensation I might be awarded. The day before trial was to begin, the insurance company called to settle. They’d pay all the medical costs and I would receive $2,000. Of that sum, $1,400 would go to the lawyer and $600 to me, plus a new bicycle. When I married, the financial issues were the same. My wife was a self-employed potter. Between the two of us we could just get by. But we had to have health insurance. We bought a policy with a $10,000 deductible and 80-20 coverage, which meant that after the deductible was paid, the company would cover 80% of any further costs. But 20% for us to pay could still be a lot. Imagine a million-dollar bill for long-term cancer treatment — not an unimaginable amount these days. We’d need to come up with $10,000 plus the $198,000 that was the 20% not covered by the policy. We could never pay that. Just hope for the best. And worry. When our daughter was born, we knew we had to have better health insurance. Taking a risk for ourselves was one thing, but such risk-taking was unacceptable to us as parents. I called my mother and asked her, “When we were kids, what did you do about health insurance?” “We never had health insurance,” she replied. “We couldn’t afford it until you were almost out of high school and both of us finally had jobs that included health care.” “I never knew that,” I told her. “I guess I never thought about it.” “We were lucky,” she said. “Neither you nor your sister was sick much. Penicillin shots when you had ear aches was about it, and we could make monthly payments to the doctor. Same with having your tonsils taken out, not at the hospital but the doctor’s office. We made payments. You didn’t need any special dental care, no braces or anything. And things didn’t cost so much in those days.” She paused, then repeated, “We were lucky.”  “But didn’t you worry?” “I worried all the time.” That was my mother — a person who did the best she could and kept her worries to herself. I hung up and decided to get a job that included health insurance. It’s a decision a lot of Americans make — to have a job more for the health coverage than the salary or the love of the work. I would from that point on be only a part-time writer and musician. But I’d have health care. Really, it was fine — I loved my work as a teacher and was pleased as I grew in that capacity, understanding more fully how to serve my students, how to see what each young person needed in order to grow. And, in the end, I think the art I made was better for the work I did, less divorced than it otherwise might have been from the daily concerns we all have. Less precious. Still, I don’t understand why we haven’t been able to develop a publicly funded universal health care system that provides coverage for everyone in our country, that offers equity in the provision of medical service, where no one lives or dies as a result of having or not having money. It’s wrong to tie health care to an individual’s ability to pay and to leave some people behind. The post Too many people are struggling without health insurance. There’s an obvious solution. appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less