Well, it's happened to me. Something has come along that will forever limit what I can do with the rest of my life. My horizons have been narrowed. I see my future and that future is no longer as free and open with possibilities as it once was. What I now see is myself as a wage slave the rest of my days. I no longer have the option of going out on my own, of following the entrepreneurial path of being my own boss.
Why? What has happened to so constrict the options for my future? It's very simple, really. I became sick.
More after the fold.
Just over a month ago, a swollen tonsil turned into a tonsillectomy, which exposed a rare form of throat cancer, especially in one so young with no risk factors, squamous cell carcinoma. This is the nasty cancer that heavy smokers get whose treatment can cause the disfigurement, the voice boxes, and all kinds of wonderful side effects.
I've never smoked a single cigarette, of any kind, in my life. I've never been a heavy drinker. I'm 10-20 years too young even if I was. But this has happened anyway. It may be viral related. Regardless, I have it.
Fortunately for me, it was caught early. I had a second surgery in which they discovered two lymph nodes with cancer, out of the 27 they removed. The good news is that the cancer was still encapsulated, and they believe they got any residual cancer from the tonsil bed, so the big, nasty tumors seem to be gone. I was definitely one of the lucky ones.
In two weeks I will begin radiation treatment to kill off any remaining cancer cells in the area. Believe me, I'm not looking forward to being on the receiving end of a linear accelerator for five-days-a-week, for six weeks. At the same time, I'm so very thankful that it is available to me. And that's because I live by one of the best cancer centers in the country, Duke University, and I have premium, employer-provided health insurance.
Great, you might say. That's all, relatively, good. The problem is, that now, I have a pre-existing condition. And not just any, but one of the big ones. What this means is that I will have to get follow up exams regularly for a few years. I will have to see the dentist more regularly for the rest of my life. It also means that I have a higher risk of additional cancers down the line.
But for my future, it also means that it will be practically impossible for me to afford, even if anyone would be willing to sell me, my own individual, private health insurance.
Forever now, I will be limited in what kinds of jobs I can look for. I will have to work for larger corporations with a big enough risk pool that I will be able to get their health insurance. If I ever decide to work for a smaller company that may have limited, or no insurance, or to start my own business, I may be completely exposed to the risk of falling sick again without insurance to help pay for it.
I grant you, my problem, right now, is nothing in comparison to those poor souls who develop conditions like mine without insurance. That's the real tragedy. That's the real suffering because one fears for one's life without any guarantee that someone will help pay for it. The uncertainty and stress is magnified ten fold.
But it's not such a large step from my privileged position of well-insured, to that scarier one of complete vulnerability. I've been there myself. For years during and after leaving graduate school my wife and I didn't have insurance. Fortunately we were young and healthy.
But I cannot take that risk anymore of flying free without insurance. We have a young son. I will hopefully someday be a cancer survivor. My wife's never been quite the same since the full, classical C-section that delivered my son 11 weeks premature. Yes, we've used our share of the health care system these last 3 years.
Every event in our lives adds to the risk of needing more health care. Every tick upwards on the scale of risk makes it that much more important that I, and all others like me, limit the possibilities of our work to those companies who can afford to provide insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions. This is yet another hidden economic cost of our very broken health care system.
It is also a very short leap from being in a secure position of good health and low risk, to completely vulnerable because un-insurable. Those already in this position understand. Those of you who are lucky enough to be healthy and well-insured, be aware of what can happen in a very, very short time.
My example is only one of many, many reasons why our system is broken. It is not one of the most serious ones, but it is one that can happen to anyone, even those of us who do all the right things to stay healthy and are lucky enough to have good insurance. It doesn't take much to go from a winner in the current system, to a loser. We need to change the system.
The reformation cannot be in half-measures that only sound good from a short-term political perspective, like the stupid gas tax holiday idea. Instead, we need change that actually address the issues of the un-insured, the under-insured and those of us with pre-existing conditions. This will not be easy, and will not be quick, but it must be done.
And as Barack Obama said in a great video from an event in Indianapolis, "We can't put it off anymore. The time is now."
So very true.
Plane