Health Care Issues Close to Home

From the Readers' Files:
1. An insurance company KILLED a mother. A healthy mother went into hospital for a broken femur that required a wire mesh around the bone. Couple days after surgery a mid-20s girl insurance agent from Orange County told my parents that mother would have to leave the hospital. Dad was livid. He paid his whole life into one of education's "best" insurance companies. When I went to all the doctors & surgeons involved in mother's surgery & asked if they checked mother out, they were all surprised she was leaving. And, to a man, they all said that it was NOT the time to release mother. When the mother went home, she wasted away & died within a few months.

2. Every rightard rant about the "evils" of socialized medicine is something that is happening right now under the current system. If your personal physician is "out of network", you will pay through the nose to see him and may not even be covered under some HMOs. I also had ridiculous wait times to get an appointment with a Dr, had my insurance yanked from under me when my employer decided to eliminate coverage and had to wait for some insurance bureaucrat decide whether or not I could see a specialist. I'm glad I never had a medical emergency that could of messup up my coverage because I did not notify my insurer that I was going to the emergency room.

3. We'd save $465,000,000 under the bill by removing the excess paid to Private Insurance Companies in the Medicare Advantage program (this would not effect providers or patients, only excess Insurance profits) and by imposing a very small tax (maybe 1%) on income over $350,000 family, or over $280,000 single - since those folks pay a much lower % of income in payroll taxes, this small tax is estimated to generate $544,000,000 needed to keep the expanded program solvent - Medicare has over-head of 3% - a fraction of Private Insurers who keep $205,000,000 a year ceo's , corporate jets, etc on their books -