The human toll of the recession on health care
Posted on April 23, 2009 by: Bill Salganik | Category: Uninsured and Underinsured
The story's getting old: Lose your job, lose your health insurance. We reported recently on a study from University of California at Berkeley - one of the co-authors is a members of CWA Local 9119 - estimating that 3.7 million people have lost health coverage since November, 2007.
That's 3.7 million scared people. This week, the New York Times reported on a Texas family that includes three of those people, the Walker family of Humble, Tex., near Houston. Danna Walker, 47, lost her job at DHL, the package delivery company. Her first concern was for her son, Jake, who has testicular cancer.
Jake's cancer is in remission, but he his condition needs to be monitored with CT scans and other expensive tests - thousands of dollars worth - every few months. Of course, Jake can't buy an individual insurance policy, because insurers won't sell him a policy that would cover his pre-existing condition.
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, a world-class hospital, says it will have to bill the family for Jake's future treatment. Desperate, the family bought a student health policy for Jake. "With a week to spare," the Times reported, "they scraped together $335 to pay the quarterly premium by delaying a house payment and pleading with the power company for a 10-day extension."
Another view of the human impact of the recession on health care comes this week from the Washington Post. It tells the story of an overwhelmed health clinic called HealthServe in North Carolina, one of the states hardest hit by the recession.
"Just six months ago, the clinic delivered same-day care to most callers, the gold standard from a health perspective," the Post said." But in October the delays crept to four days, then 19 in November and 25 in December. In January, HealthServe temporarily stopped accepting new patients, and almost immediately 380 people put their names on a waiting list for when the crunch eases."
The problems of the health system and the problems of the economy are clearly connected. That's why CWA believes we can't wait until after the recession to fix health care. Fixing health care is part of fixing the economy.
