By Malinda Markowitz
Lansing State Journal
July 17, 2008
If you’re wondering why health care has been such a central issue of the presidential campaign this year, meet Karyn McCartney of Mason.
In February, Karyn, then nine months pregnant, and her husband were hit by another car “from the passenger side where I was sitting,” wrote Karyn recently to the National Nurses Organizing Committee.
The accident left Karyn with broken ribs, collapsed lungs, pelvic fractures, and severe nerve damage. Her daughter had similar injuries.
Though the young couple had no health insurance, their car insurance paid much of the costs. “But we have to live every day praying we’ll make the bills. Due to family, friends, and complete strangers giving us donations we’ve been able to make all our payments and give our daughter the things she needs.”
Karyn is still battling with seizures and worries about who will pay for needed medication and her daughter’s ongoing bills. She says she’s been lucky to have the help of her rehab doctors “who will fight for me to get the insurance to pay for things I need.”
The past eight years have seen a big jump in the number of Americans under 29 without health coverage, along with other increases in the uninsured and under insured. Meanwhile, the cost of employer-based health insurance has ballooned 10 times faster than workers’ income since 2000, the year President Bush was elected.
Sen. John McCain’s health plan doesn’t seem to offer much change. His prescription of once a year tax credits to buy insurance won’t help those living paycheck to paycheck. His proposal to eliminate tax deductions for employer-sponsored health benefits would likely shift more of the risk and cost to families.
Sen. Barack Obama would offer more public subsidies for health care and tougher oversight on insurers, and says everyone should have a plan comparable to what members of Congress receive.
But his plan, like McCain’s, still leaves too much control over our health and our pocketbooks in the hands of the insurance giants who created this mess.
“It’s scary to even think of ‘what if I didn’t have auto insurance’ or ‘what if this wasn’t from a car accident’,” says Karyn. “We’re saving all we can hoping to some day move to a better place.”
Where might they go? Just about any other industrialized country in the world has a health care system with full, universal coverage that is not dependent on your job, that doesn’t impose crippling co-pays and deductibles, that doesn’t drop you when you are sick, and puts care decisions in the hands of you and your doctor, not insurance agents.
It’s possible here as well. HR 676, by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan with 90 co-sponsors would essentially improve and expand Medicare and extend it to cover everyone.
Families like Karyn’s shouldn’t have to count on their auto insurance, or have to talk about moving elsewhere, to receive the humane health coverage all of us deserve.
Malinda Markowitz of San Jose, Calif., is a co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association (www.guaranteedhealthcare.com)