Health Insurance Has Two Sides

“Squeek, Squeek!” A nurse takes a long look at my haggard face, then looks away. “Is Mira OK?” I ask.

“We don’t know how long she has left. After we revived her, she fell into a coma.” Doctor Watson looks away. Silence chokes out all thought now, my sight starts to fade. What could I do? What hadn’t I tried? My thoughts turn to a memory from a few years before.

“Mira? Are you all right?” I’d asked panic. I fumbled the phone as I tried to call 911, it fell to the floor. I screamed in frustration and rushed downstairs and called the ambulance. Everything after that was a blur. Paramedics rushed in the house, police asked me questions, I was taken to the hospital by one of the local policeman. Life has never been the same for us, the debt hole we’ve found ourselves in seems bottomless. Five hundred dollars for stitches. Five thousand dollars for a doctor. Fifty thousand dollars for a bypass operation. The problem was that we simply could not find affordable health insurance. Mira and I were in the same boat that many seniors reach in their retirement years. We’d always received healthcare from our employer, until the economy collapsed and the company went bankrupt.What were we going to do now? We were out of money, our savings of over a million dollars was gone.

Mira’s heart problems were bad enough, but with my arthritis, our funds were cracking.. Where was the affordable healthcare we needed? We sent applications everywhere, but we could not find one affordable health insurance carrier anywhere. We were flying in a storm without a compass.

“There was nothing we could do.” The good doctor’s sad face said it all. He quietly shut the door, leaving me with nothing. Now I was left alone, left to watch my wife die because we could not find an affordable health insurance carrier to pay for preventative care. My head hits the wall behind my chair and I’m swallowed by a recent memory.

My cereal crackles as I finish tying my shoes. It’s time for my morning excercise. Mira nods at me as she walks into the kitchen for breakfast. After her usual piece of toast, she opens the medicine cabinet for her daily pills. She turns her heart medication bottle upside down, and nothing comes out. She sets down the container and goes back to bed. After my morning jog, I come back and Mira is crying in the living room. Mira is staring at the empty medicine bottle, and at the stack of unopened bills on the corner of the table. I sit down next to her, not saying anything. What could I say? What do you tell to someone who has been condemned to die because of circumstances beyond his or her control? I put my arm around her, and cry too.

I begin to sob. I’m sitting next to a woman who just a day before was one of the most vibrant people I’ve ever known. She could still be here if she hadn’t been denied her pills. Instead, she is lying in a hospital bed worth thousands of dollars using expensive equipment that could be used by someone else who is more in need. All she needed was a simple dollar pill. All we needed was affordable health insurance. “What kind of country denies cheap pills to its citizens but allows them to use a hospital even when there is no hope in being repaid?” I wonder aloud. Doctor Watson ushers me out of the room so he can finish his paper work.

Best affordable health insurance I have been able to find is here. healthplanone.com
About the Author

Angel Wall writes regularly about health related topics. I hope you enjoy this article.

Tags: affordable health insurance, affordable health insurance carrier, affordable healthcare, debt, doctor, Health Insurance, healthcare, insurance car, preventive care, retirement, seniors