And now for a topic that everybody loves! INSURANCE!
Aha . . . ahahaha . . . ha . . . ha ha ha . . .
*ahem* Anyway . . .
Insurance is a discussion that nobody likes, but let me tell you why it's an especially difficult conversation for people who are chronically ill.
Work Insurance is Great! . . . When It's There
As if jobs and job hunting and benefits weren't fun enough to worry about and think about, for people with chronic illnesses it can literally be a matter of life and death.
"Isn't that kind of dramatic?" you may ask. "It might be inconvenient, but surely it's not THAT bad."
Well, my friend, it really IS that bad.
Chronically ill people have a hard enough time as it is finding and maintaining work because of their illnesses. Making sure they are covered by insurance just makes it all harder. Part time hours, which are more workable with chronic health challenges, don't always provide benefits. Those benefits are almost always necessary for people with chronic health issues to remain on the healthier side of things. Shots, x-rays, inhalers, epipens, insulin, mood regulatory meds, gut health meds, chemo treatments--all of these things get impossibly expensive ridiculously fast. Many of them START ridiculously expensive. Even with insurance. Not being able to have benefits is devastating for anyone suffering with chronic illnesses.
And we need those things to live. Not want. NEED. A person can die from allergic reactions without epipens. Asthmatics can suffocate without the right inhalants. People with lupus cannot function in the levels of pain they experience without proper treatments.
Places that don't provide insurance are exacerbating the growing health crises that our society is facing. Some people CAN'T work more than part-time hours, nor do they always live with people who can cover them with their own insurance, like parents or spouses. If people can't afford to be healthy, their health won't improve and they will be forever stuck in a spiral of being too ill to work but being too poor to not work.
Even When Insurance is There, It's Not Always There Enough
Okay, so someone with chronic illness thinks they can manage, or they have to learn to manage, a full time job and, yay, it comes with benefits!
Oh wait, those benefits don't start for three months, maybe longer.
In the meantime, how does someone with chronic illness survive? Sometimes they can get several months of medications ahead of time, but sometimes they can't. Do the people who can't stockpile meds deserve to have their health and their lives at risk while waiting for insurance to start? What if their illness takes a turn for the worst and they need more care, sooner? And even if they have the meds, there's still doctors visits and therapists that we need to see regularly. How can we pay for that?
State insurance and government aid are great, but not everywhere accepts them or they only accept specific kinds. And they aren't endless wealth banks. As nice as it is to have alternative aid available, it's not all-powerful.
And Then, Insurance Doesn't Even Cover Everything
Insurance not covering everything goes two ways:
1. Deductibles are murder
2. Not all chronic health challenges are recognized or covered by insurance
I don't know that I need to go too far into the deductible problem (although I will in a future post if it requested!), but the second problem is a REAL problem. While chronic health problems are on the rise, there's still enough stigma and not enough information on a lot of them for them to be considered real problems that insurance should cover. That makes it really, really difficult to afford taking care of them. A lot of insurances also don't cover pre-existing conditions, so there's that.
Then, when insurance does cover them, you have to go through a million tests (which you have to pay at least part of if you're deductible isn't met) for them to make sure that the problem you have is, in fact, the problem you have. If you switch insurances in the middle of this process, you get to start it all over again, paying for it all again. When you're already struggle making ends meet.
Finally, if they can't pinpoint exactly what isn't working, or why it isn't working, all that money is just wasted. Sometimes they can give people things to help the symptoms, but the overall problem going untreated means that you're treating symptoms forever. When that happens, they don't always give out prescriptions and instead suggest over-the-counter or at-home remedies that you have to pay for out of pocket. While on the one hand, it might be nice to worry about prescriptions, on the other hand no prescriptions means completely out-of-pocket expenses.
Overall, Insurance and Chronic Illness Aren't Friends
My dream would be to change the medical world to be less about making money and treating symptoms and more about the actual wellness of the people. It shouldn't be a fight to get necessary medical care just to live. Life shouldn't be a long punishment game; it's plenty hard as it is living on Earth without people making it harder on each other. Insurance companies, while making some things about health easier, also created a nightmare with their policies. Jobs, while kindly providing insurance benefits, are also keeping their employees locked in deathly cycles.
Chronic illnesses don't just magically go away if insurances and jobs don't believe they exist. They're still there and they're still a need to be met. Hopefully, by opening up more discussions about the need for better health care, we can come up with some real solutions that actually help people without making other peoples' lives worse.
As always, comments are welcome!
Cheers~
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