Today’s guest poster for Outsider Politics Week is my friend Melanie Mattson, of Just A Bump in the Beltway. Here’s her story:

Ever since I was a kid (a very sick kid, at that), it seemed to me there was something morally wrong about making money off of other people’s ill health. That is, in essence, what the health insurance industry does.

I have a running argument with one of the trolls at Effect Measure about whether health is a right, or a privilege.

This is clearly a class issue: he maintains that health is a privilege. It must be one privilege he has. For those of us on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, it’s a struggle.

I really should have been in an intensive care unit after I got sick last summer. But I didn’t have health insurance, so that was out of the question. What I really I needed was to be hooked up to IV fluids and electrolytes. The fact that I wasn’t has delayed my recovery, even now.

The so-called “insurance” I have now is so lousy and expensive that it can’t be considered anything other than catastrophic covereage, I had to lie to get it and it probably wouldn’t have covered my illness of last year, anyway. And it’s costing me $500 a month for the privilege of inferior coverage. That’s the
marketplace you’re in if you don’t have an employer-sponsored group plan.

It isn’t 1994 anymore and most people have now been hassled by their insurance companies (if they still have insurance), or are struggling to make the payments. Those people are aware that we are an a health care crisis which can only be resolved by going to some sort of single-payer system. We can argue about
whether it should be like Canada’s or Germany’s, and the insurance industry propaganda will be about how there are long waiting lists for care in those countries (how long do YOU have to wait for a non-emergency appointment with your doctors?)

But the system ain’t working, and people who have less than
Cadillac insurance plans (which excludes members of
Congress who are on the FEHBPlan,
probably the best in the country) have horror stories
to tell.

Even back in the day when I had a Cadillac
plan, I remember the time I spent 15 hours over 5 days
on the phone with the Aetna benefits manager in
order to get more than a 30-day refill of the drugs I
was on at the time.

I was going on vacation for a couple of weeks (let’s see, that was 1998, the last time I had a vacation). For those of you who still actually get to take vacations, make sure that you
take them inside the 30-day limits of your refills.

Right now, it is the working people of this country versus the insurers, and Moore understands this better than anyone.

You can watch Sicko on the link. It takes about an hour to download if you are on cable broadband.

While the rest of us are paying attention, you’ll notice that the MSM isn’t talking about this: CNN is giving me wall to wall treatment of the murder of this woman in Ohio. Geeze, there are murders everyday around this country but this one is being
treated as entertainment.

Murder as entertainment? Go figure. Meanwhile, the pressing issues of the day are left unmentioned.