Also serving the communities of De Luz, Rainbow, Camp Pendleton, Pala and Pauma

Taking the money and running before time runs out

I just got the projected cost for 2010 of my medical insurance premiums for the one of us not under Medicare. These premiums have gone up 1000 percent since 1999, when we both were covered under employer-provided insurance. Co-pays have been added or increased and the annual deductible has gone up by 15 percent for 2010.

This plan is based on a large base of healthy employees. If my spouse started today, she could not get coverage; she has a preexisting condition. And in the past when I have changed employers, my coverage was gapped and I had to wait 30 to 90 days for coverage.

I happened to be watching CSPAN and heard Sen. Feinstein speak on medical insurance this past week. I found the reasons for these outrageous increases and you can, too by calling up http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query and reading pages S10974-77.

These increases and other inequities are the product of outsourcing our healthcare to commercial entities that are responsible solely to shareholders and highly paid executives.

We the people cannot afford not to systematize and modernize our systems of healthcare. We’ve got to have healthcare delivered to the patient and not filtered – skimmed – by commercial insurers.

The only way to bring down insurance premiums is competition from a public option now. Then we’d have coverage and records portability, no exclusions for “existing conditions,” no “gapping” and rates based on coverage, not claims histories based on cherry-picked insureds.

 

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