"I'm uninsurable and terminal": An American teacher is dying today

When I receive information about something this ghastly, I drop everything.  Over the years, I've developed a primal need to alert the world to these uniquely American atrocities.

Today, we're going to learn about an American teacher in Los Angeles who is dying of cancer and about to exhaust her very unaffordable and expensive COBRA benefits.

America Politicians, just hang your heads in shame.

Despite lofty talk on the campaign trail, what you're about to read, is undoubtedly the reality for many American teachers. We need to pay them what they're worth, we need to value their heroic work, and when they get sick, don't we have a moral responsibility to take care of them--to provide guaranteed and affordable healthcare to them and all Americans?

Shame on America the political class. Yes, shame on all of them. And three cheers for Michelle Obama for speaking the uncomfortable truth.  We know what she means, and so does everyone else.

She's talking about underpaid teachers and  unarmored veterans and all of us, just waiting for a crumb of the American dream.

Keep reading about the grotesque state of affairs, in what was once, the richest country on the plaanet.

I'm speaking about this story by Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times.

Let me give it to you right between the eyes.

Fighting to live, remain insured

"I am dying."

Those were the first three words of the e-mail Christine Lilly sent me.

"Or that's what they tell me," she continued. "But then, aren't we all?"

When I went to meet her, Lilly was reclining at the end of a long row of chemotherapy stations at a UCLA medical clinic in Santa Monica. Ten patients sat against windows, medicine dripping into their bodies as they gazed at the life surging past on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Lilly, a former schoolteacher in the midst of her fourth round of fighting inflammatory breast cancer since 2004, is in a clinical trial. At 57, she's not ready to close her eyes and go quietly, even if it means spending half of each day fighting for health insurance.

"I just can't believe this," the Westchester resident said in that e-mail, in which she talked about the high cost of staying alive. "I have a lot of guilt already about the financial position that I have put my family in."

Her white cell count was too low to handle much medicine the day I visited, so she finished before her son arrived to pick her up. She got rid of her own car as part of the scaling back she's had to do to pay the COBRA insurance, which is running her $500 a month.

http://www.latimes.com/...

You see, in the United States, we're supposed to be grateful to the politicians to pay choking amounts to buy COBRA insurance.

My best friend is currently paying close to $1600.00 a month for himself, his wife and their 11 year-old son for COBRA insurance.  He happens to be Italian and every month when he writes the check, he calls to both ask and tell me how bad things are in this country. He says, "if Americans could only taste the alternative, accessing and paying for healthcare should not be a daily worry." Spoken by someone very familiar with the alternative.

Back to the teacher in Los Angeles. She's not lucky because she lives in California, the  land of retroactive cancellations, and an  insurance industry which will only  insure the young and healthy.

"I'm uninsurable and terminal"

She kept teaching second and third grades as long as she could at a Los Angeles elementary school, but finally had to give up a career that was interrupted over the years by the birth of four children and her husband's job transfers. The federal COBRA coverage dries up at the end of this month, she said, and she's trying to get an extension through L.A. Unified.

If that doesn't work, she'll apply for an 18-month state-run COBRA extension. But that one would cost her $800 monthly, she said, and wouldn't include dental or vision care.

"And I've got a lot of dental damage from the treatment," she said.

If she's lucky enough to survive another 18 months, she doesn't know what she'll do.

"I'm uninsurable and I'm terminal, for Pete's sake. Even at $800 a month, we're going to be living paycheck to paycheck, trying to live as normal a life as possible. But normal is hard to hold onto."

This is what Lily's oncologist has to say. And his words should reverberate through your mind every day. As I have said repeatedly, healthcare reform without stringent price restraints and draconian regulation, isn't worth the paper it's written on.

"Congress did this so people would be able to get insurance, but it didn't legislate the price, so the cost is astronomical and then it runs out," Barstis said. "It's why we need universal healthcare. I think it's disgusting."

Of Lilly, he said: "She's had to fight and claw to stay alive, and she's done a great job of it."

Let me leave you with this, which I've been meaning to do for several days.

The healthcare/for-profit health insurance situation in the United States is so desperate, that law enforcement agencies have started to take matters into their own hands.

The latest effort, is a web site from the Los Angeles City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo called  Protecting the Insured.

The Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney has launched a law enforcement investigation into potentially unfair business practices by health plans and health insurers, particularly with respect to their improper denial of claims for coverage made by consumers, or their cancellation of consumers’ coverage altogether.

And finally, these insurance companies are the corporate criminals both our candidates intend to entrust with the health of the American people.

Our currently conceived healthcare system is unfixable and our candidates know it.  It is a system based maximizing profits which can only be accomplished by denying care and defrauding the American people.

We can must do better.