Stories

I became very ill and was determined disabled in 1997. I was forced to switch my health care to Medicare because of disability benefits that I began to receive.  It seems there is a law that says even though I had benefits under the "family plan" of my husband's employer (for which he has money withheld from his paycheck to help pay for this coverage), that if the employer has less than 100 employees then any family members "eligible" for Medicare MUST be changed on the employer-sponsored plan. They do this to have Medicare become that family member's "primary insurer" and the employer sponsored plan MUST become the "secondary insurer".  I have NO CHOICE in the matter.

This has further limited the doctors available to me (even more than the employer sponsored plan did) since many doctors are no longer accepting Medicare patients.  Now, please remember that my husband still pays for the "family coverage" insurance amount because they are the "secondary insurer" but the benefits I get are almost nothing because Medicare is my "primary insurer" and the "secondary insurer" is allowed…actually  MUST deny any charge that Medicare denies! Medicare guidelines apply for the secondary insurer when it comes to denials. So as Medicare cuts its benefits to seniors and the disabled, so too does the "secondary insurer".

My brother suffers from an undiagnosed chronic degenerative metabolic disorder.  Because it is one-of-a-kind, doctors don't even have a name for it; it's something known as an "orphan disease."  In my brother's case, he's spent the past twenty-three years growing up, and now that he has the apparent physical maturity of a fifteen-year-old (and mental maturity of a three-year-old), he is dying from the afflictions of a ninety-year-old, suffering from things like severe osteoporosis and organ failure.

Under our current health care system, Americans and American organizations have the money to spend on research to cure people like my brother, with unnamed orphan diseases.  But under Obama's health care reform bill, all of that would end.  "Free" health care is anything but, and the added costs to our system from nationalized health care would destroy the research sector of the medical community--at least in the area of orphan disease research.  We cannot let Obama's health care reform bill pass; although diseases like my brother's are rare, they still affect many people and their families. 

It isn't fair to let the government decide whose disease is more worth researching, and it isn't fair to let the government decide if my family's tax money should go to other people's health care when we have my brother to care for.  We cannot let this pass.

Nine years ago I married an American and moved to the United States. Within three months I required medical attention and was amazed that it only took two days to receive an appointment. I was even more amazed that, within the week, I saw a specialist and had an MRI, for which I received results within three days. I know, the previous sentence is a run on sentence, but it angers me to think about the lack of immediate health care available in Canada.
 
The operation I required soon after marrying was due to the lack of specialists available in Canada 1 1/2 years earlier when half of my thyroid was removed. This is only one of many operations that I could comment on, but by-and-far the worst.