What will it take for everyone to get the message that the U.S. government in its current state doesn’t give a shit about our health (especially women’s health), and get pissed off and start voting for people who actually appear to have some shred of human decency?
The Senate is considering a bill that would allow health insurance providers to be exempt from covering mammograms, colorectal cancer screenings, pap smears, and other preventative measures and treatments. WTF?
Write your Senator via the American Cancer Society. Feel free to tell them that having one’s head perpetually up one’s ass causes cancer.
h/t Darcey
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26 Responses to "Maybe they’re trying to kill us off"
Yeah, stuff like this just pisses me off. I’m email it to my contacts at a couple local radio stations, too - if they can get it up and posted on their websites, it could draw some really important exposure!
maybethey’re trying to kill us offfixed that for you
I’m curious as to what the official rationale is.
This is more in the line of trying to keep people from even having the right to sue. They started this bs with the “we have to end the junk lawsuits” mess they did a while back.
Gotta get em out in November.
WTF is right.
Fucking assholes.
One of the causes of rising health care costs is that insurance companies are forced to provide certain “mandatory” benefits by government fiat. But part of the point of insurance is that people should be able to opt into whatever sort of plan they are willing to pay for. A healthy 25 year old male who doesn’t smoke or drink excessively, for instance, might decide to take his chances with a plan that only covers major catastrophes (and pay out-of-pocket for any doctor’s visits), or a plan that only covers small stuff but doesn’t cover big stuff (depending on which way he feels more confident rolling the dice). He might decide to get a plan that doesn’t cover heart-related problems at all, but which does cover mental health problems (since he’s read that schizophrenia usually sets in, if it’s going to, in the 20s). To each his own, and all that.
But when insurance companies are forced to cover certain ailments on all their policies, the cost of insurance goes up for everyone. Insurance companies and their customers are no longer allowed to make certain decisions about what is best for themselves, but are instead told what kind of policy they must provide/have.
Of course, the sorts of “regular” checkup things are good and wise things to have, and I would encourage any woman who asked for my advice to get them regularly and to have an insurance policy that covers them. But I suppose some women like to live dangerously, and why shouldn’t they be able to do so?
Xon, or anybody, is a health care provider covering ‘mammograms, colorectal cancer screenings, pap smears, and other preventative measures and treatments’ more like an automobile manufacturer providing engines to the vehicles it produces and markets or more like an automobile manufacturer providing On-Star to the vehicles it produces and markets? There are, perhaps, much better comparisons and analogies to be made (certain invasive cancer screenings being provided by an insurance company, rather than being paid out-of-pocket, seem more like a bug inspection and extermination in one’s home provided by a landlord, for instance).
My thought is that there are some who think certain benefits are more essential than amenities, and there are some who think that everything is an amenity to those who can afford it, and there are some who think that what are now regarded as amenities are in fact essentials for human life. Should these sorts of disagreements be forced, though, to one definite judgment of what is necessary for life?
In other words, is our government currently in the best position to make these decisions for us?
Xon wrote:
I mean, yeah, word. I would very much like to be able to make that choice as a healthy 20 year old male. I already have a large proportion of my income siphoned off on auto insurance, and I do not need yet another vacuum into which to throw my money for nothing.
I want coverage if I get apendicitis tomorrow. Otherwise, it’s been years since I’ve been on any kind of “doctor’s visit” and don’t plan on arranging one anytime soon. What the hell am I paying for?
valeko, off the cuff, what is the difference between paying health insurance for appendicitis and paying social security taxes for retirement?
Pap smears and mammograms are not recreational, nor are they “nice to have.” Jesus Christ. It’s called “preventative care.” It is cheaper in the long run if we all get it instead of, oh, I don’t know, FUCKING CANCER, because cancer is expensive to treat. Just like contraception is by-and-large less expensive than maternity care and the ensuing child healthcare costs. If you want shitty insurance that doesn’t cover preventative care, you can get it already. What I get through my employer I want and expect to be quality, no bullshit coverage. Period. Anything less is insulting and ridiculously stupid. It’s the same damn problem as certain segments of the population always going to the fucking emergency room — it’s really very expensive in comparison to a visit to the GP (and that’s whether or not you happen to be insured or not).
You beat me to it, Nikki. I’ve enjoyed (and when I say “enjoyed” I mean “wanted to vomit”) the fact that a bunch of guys have been talking about the three procedures I mentioned as if they are all 1) women-only procedures (hint: men have colons, too); and 2) “optional” or “non-essential.” Mammograms and colorectal screenings are for most (but certainly not all) people not necessary until middle age, but pap smears? Hello. You have one every year, starting at age 18 or whenever you start going to the OB/GYN (which for me was age 14). And they’re not just for screening for cancer. But I love that I have to explain these basic facts to people who like to speak w/ so much bluster about healthcare on an ideological basis.
I’d be interested to see if the proposed bill exempts prostate cancer screenings…?
Also, as a final note…
That is just too funny. I’m sure scores of women are lining up to ask you for medical advice, Xon! And what a gent that you’ll advise them to get “the sort of ‘regular’ checkup things” -although how they pay for those things isn’t your problem, I s’pose (’cause you know, everyone who doesn’t have decent health coverage is simply choosing to live dangerously).
you gotta be fucking kidding me. Seriously. I am so fed up with this bullshit. This goddamned attitude that the government is taking on our health is completely ridiculous. It is OBVIOUS now that they don’t give a shit about any of us, so why the fuck are we still taking it? UH!
Amber:
And that really captures the problem that I see with Xon’s consistently market-oriented, Libertarian perspectives.
The private sector simply cannot be counted on, in any kind of practical terms that translate into actual accessibility for the end-consumer, provide a certain standard of quality preventive care, or for that matter, a certain quality of anything. People with a blinding ideological commitment to free-market solutions tend to simply see individual instances of “market failure,” rather than the market’s paradigmatic inadequacy for certain aspects of human welfare. That is why regulations exist.
The healthcare sector will not provide an acceptable standard of X anymore than steel mills or meat-packing plants in at the turn of the 20th century provided Y to anyone’s satisfaction.
I also strongly agree with Nikki that employer-sponsored healthcare coverage should actually amount to something, and that if you’re going to have it in the first place, it should be obligatory for it to cover a relatively large swath of things.
Charles:
Off the cuff, the difference is that when my social security taxes are disbursed, the theory goes, I get to spend that money in its totality.
I know a few nights’ hospital stay and a minor operation can easily amount to tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare bills, but I still don’t see it being a return on the investment I’m making paying into a health coverage scheme that won’t be tapped for several years until the day of apendicitis comes. The inflated nature of those costs only adds to the absurdity.
I’ve been considering living uninsured for a long time. Yeah, I know it’s a terrible idea, that’s why I won’t do it, but really, on a monthly basis, it’s a completely bullshit deduction from my cheque.
Oh, and if I’m going to make me arse bleed with premium payments, it better cover everything. What the fuck is the deal with copayments?
To my understanding, the co-payment helps defer the cost of most basic preventive treatments. Which is why $20 for a check-up gets to be frustrating for a lot of people … though I’ll still argue it’s $20 to make sure you’re not, you know, dying.
However, those big procedures, like say cancer treatment or heart surgery feature (if any) co-payments which are so marginal in comparison to the actual cost of the procedure, it’s ridiculous. Plus the insurance companies offer plenty of other perks in their numerous packages which are, believe it or not, quite beneficial.
For instance, when my father endured his stem cell treatment a few years back, he received significant compensatory pay through his employer’s insurance package, as well as (almost) complete coverage of costs for all of his treatment. It was an excellent deal, but one he paid for generously in the years when he was healthy.
Listen, I’ve got plenty of problems with the insurance industry and the state of our health care, but insurance (if you can get it) is worth every penny. Making it more accessible is another thing.
Then I’d say your father is very lucky. Most insurance packages don’t accrue that way. Any employer-based health plans (I’m a private sector employee working for small businesses) that have ever been available to me aren’t going to reward me for spending my youth paying into the system by offering that level of coverage when I get older and health disasters strike. I’ll still owe several thousand.
That’s where I really get torn between supporting and opposing the Libertarian ethic on the subject as far as my personal finances are concerned. It’d be much more rational to make some successful investments and have the money to cover those kinds of expenses out of pocket than stay bound to these absurd HMOs. But my existence is privileged enough for me to able to have those kinds of considerations at my disposal. As Amber (and Nikki, and duane, and everyone else) rightly point out, that’s not the case for everyone, and it’s their welfare that’s at issue here.
Oh, and, I’m no medic, but, my experience with commercial medicine does not lead me to believe that “preventative” checkups lead to the accidental discovery of things that are in the process of making you die. That’s $20 I’m paying because … um, that’s $20 I’m paying.
That diagnostic process is usually initiated by patient reports of symptoms.
From my own childhood experience, I can attest to the fact that Soviet (and even European, tendentially) preventative checkups were a lot more thorough, so they had a much higher probability of catching things. Those would probably be worth the $20. An average visit to an American GP isn’t worth the hair in my navel, and I’d only take it 1) if it were completely “free” (”covered”) 2) if I had lots of time on my hands 3) was feeling lonely.
Try going for your yearly girl-oriented constitutional. It’s quite thorough. As was the physcial I had done about a year and a half ago. The stuff they don’t want the poor widdle insurance companies to pay for ARE ALL preventative care items.
Yeah. Like, how about the fact that my dad hasn’t had health insurance for most of my life (because he couldn’t afford it, and being self-employed there was no employer to partially subsidize it); then when he finally got to where he could theoretically pay for it himself, he was denied due to “existing medical conditions.” What the fuck kind of bullshit is that?? And then, of course, as you know, he had a stroke (accompanied by a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes), the hospital stay for which my parents are having to pay for out of pocket.
Wonderful thing to happen in the wealthiest country in the world. Ever wonder why the wealthiest country isn’t also the healthiest country?
And, a preemptive “fuck you” to anyone who comes back and starts a comment with, “Amber, what happened to your dad is unfortunate, but…”
Yeah, I’d have to go with what Nikki says. Going to the woman-doctor is about as thorough you’re going to get, short of an anal probe. No, wait, you get that, too. And that inspection DOES (to quote valeko) lead to the accidental discovery of things that are in the process of making you die, which is how one of my best friends found out she had cervical cancer at age 19. She didn’t go in there to the doctor saying, “hey, doc, something feels funny in my cervical-area, you think it might be cancer?” It was something that was discovered on a normal, routine, preventative PAP smear. Something that, had her insurance not covered it, she may not have thought to have it done (because she was supporting herself on a very limited income), and there’s no telling where her cancer would be today, 6 years later.
And THAT is why I think its ridiculous that anyone is even arguing this point.
Amber, my comment about what I would tell women to do was tongue-in-cheek (I don’t do emoticons, because they are never appropriate…there, I did it again…tongue-in-cheek). But you might notice from the context of my comment that my point there was to make a concesssion to your position. I understand that when we’re talking about basic preventative treatments that it seems like health insurance is a pretty good deal. And, while men certainly have colons, as you yourself pointed out the concern over colon cancer doesn’t generally start getting checked until middle-age or so. So, my picture of the young maverick deciding to go without health insurance and take the risks involved with that choice is more likely to be male, because males don’t tend to have all the regular checkup/preventative stuff that they are supposed to do at such an earlier age. In other words, I realized that I was saying didn’t seem it would work equally well for everybody. But the “Xon the jerk” interpretation always goes down smoother.
As to my overall point, y’all still aren’t addressing it. In fact, you’re just reconfirming it. The original complaint was about laws governing what insurance companies have to cover. My argument is that there should not be such laws because such laws drive up the price of health insurance. Now, in the process of this conversation thread, a number of you are complaining about…the high costs of insurance. You want all this stuff to be covered, and you want it to be cheap, but you get upset when the government gives insurance companies the kind of freedom necessary to make it cheaper. Your position seems to have, as the olde tyme philsophers would say, a coherence problem.
My point is not that everyone who doesn’t have health insurance is choosing to live dangerously, but rather that a significant number of people who don’t have it are choosing to live that way because they think their money could be better spent at this point of their lives. Any law that moves towards mandatory insurance for everyone (and laws dictating what insurance companies have to cover, all the time, are a move in this direction) is a move towards taking away the freedom of those valeko’s of the world who simply think their money could be better well spent. And is valeko in a horrible place? Hardly. But the politicians group him in with the “millions of uninsured Americans, how sad what a pity.” But certainly you are correct to note that there are also people in this country who really want health insurance but simply cannot afford it at its current rate. But then it is curious that you don’t support policies that would make those rates come down for those poor souls.
Amber, I never said that the procedures were strictly for women (having had my own colon examined during my life several times for then-unexplainable recurring pains in my abdomen), nor did I say that the procedures are, in effect, inessential. (Let me point out this: if we should not regard these treatments from a “women-only” perspective, what’s the point in your first parenthetical statement that legislators don’t care especially for women’s health, in calling attention to this being a bunch of guys [men? boys? males? dudes?] discussing these issues, and in wondering if prostate screenings will be exempted?) I asked questions about what people think these are more like. You and Nikki, and duane, The Muse, &tc, answered: these are more like essentials in life, and therefore ought to be mandatory provisions.
My concerns about ideology are more to do with what the classical Marxists called “false consciousness”, or with what some more contemporary ones might refer to as “interpellation”. My thought is that the idea of certain things becoming essential or necessary for human life should not be separated from any analysis of who benefits from the institutionalization or embedding of that need, whether it is a thing such as literature, technology, human rights, hospitals, or clean renewable energy. There are many things in life we regard, in our own ways, as unqualified goods. Yet, I think that the process through which we decide the good and set it apart without qualification is not always as virtuous or immediate as we confuse ourselves into believing.
So, provisions given from whom? Xon believes, as valeko pointed out, that by eliminating government controls over the marketplace of health care, people will be better off to afford a reasonably priced, reasonably effective treatment. However, valeko also pointed out that his personal experience has been (I take it) the opposite: under the managed system of the Soviet Union, he received better preventative care than in the managed system of the United States. I take it that one such reason why the care in the United States is less is precisely because of who manages the care in the US and how much they need to retain a percentage of their income as profit.
Mandating insurance companies pay for preventative care, or simply not permitting exemptions of preventative care, (these are very different things, and it seems we get more arguments for the former, even though such arguments supercede those for the latter) perhaps will not change the drive to profit in a more equitable or just direction so long as there is still the human incentive to turn any service or provision into a means of procuring wealth.
In other words, until we even stop treating our own preventative care, to ourselves, as a way of saving money. As I summarize Nikki’s concern:
My concern is not for making the place free for the market to determine what things are essential or amenities for us, through our participation in the pricing and purchasing of these products. My concern is that in any struggle to achieve a just society, whenever economic justice triumphs as a way to measure the accomplishment of the distribution of good, we already have a market evaluation in progress, rather than an evaluation with respect to, say, dignity or virtue or charity.
I think Nikki is entirely right on the facts: preventative care and preventative maintenance are, on the whole and in the long term, far more cost effective than treating illnesses or disease once they become too debilitating. But, I also think Xon is right about one interpretation of the facts: we cannot want cheap and widely available quality health care all at the same time, unless we are willing to make a very gratuitous concession. Xon leans in the direction of that concession being the free market. Others lean towards that concession being control of health care by an elected, accountable body. But we know that cheap and widely available products that are advertised as such are intuitively regarded as pejorative commodities. Unless certain market forces are redeemed or reformed or revolutionized, we will not have good quality health care but McHospitals.
And some, poorer than we are, probably already know we are there.
I apologize for the length of this comment, in advance.
Insurance costs are high because the young and healthy are not paying into the system, and also because for whatever reason, unlike nearly every other civilised nation on the planet, we feel like it’s ok to charge what the supposed market will bear for basic health care, which is, IMHO, a basic HUMAN RIGHT. Scandinavia seems to have this sorted out, as does Canada and the UK.
Clearly, as per usual, the “fuck those of you without money to pay for it — the weak die young” attitude (which is really what’s being said) doesn’t go over well with those of us that know the facts — that minorities and women are always going to be hit harder by this bullshit than the whiney white men in power.
My husband works for a conservative company — a nearly notoriously conservative company — and my recent not-nearly-so-common procedure was fully covered because said company has its head on straight about what they want covered in a plan — preventative care. The answer here is NOT giving insurance companies the option of paying for cancer prevention now or actual cancer later — the answer is changing the health care culture in this country, so that people DO seek preventative care, even young maverick men who maybe, just maybe, are going to have an appendicitis tomorrow.
There’s a reason the U.S. is very far down the ladder in terms of overall health, relative to the other industrialized Western nations of the world.
How topical… I just spotted this MSNBC article (“U.S. gets poor grades for newborns’ survival”), via figleaf.