Reply #10: Union Yes, that is a heart-rending and infuriating story. [View All]

I have another story from the other side of the great divide in America. When my mother was 85, she was operated on for a heart-valve replacement. They thought she was a good candidate in spite of her age because she was very fit in every other way. She had the valve replacement, surgery a great success, but somehow she never really recovered, all sorts of complications and spent six months in the ICU, then the next two years in and out of the hospital for at least six extended stays. Oxygen 24/7, kidney and lung complications, etc. etc. I can't count the number of high-tech "procedures" that were done multiple times before she finally said ENOUGH. She died peacefully in her bed about two weeks after we called in Hospice.

The out-of-pocket expenses for this intensive three-year multi-surgery effort to keep an old woman alive as an invalid? ZERO. Not a single bill was ever presented for anything. (Except sometimes for the TV in the room at the hospital.)

My parents had superb health insurance from their lifetime as public school teachers in Delaware. In the entire last five years of her life, she never paid a copay or wrote a check for any medical care. I found this to be mind-blowing. I must admit that I sometimes thought the level of treatment she was subjected to was influenced by her level of insurance. I had to ask myself if they were treating her beyond what was really humane.

As a self-employed person who has struggled to find ways to pay for my own health insurance, I was amazed by the difference between my mother's experience of the medical system and my own. We really do live in a divided world.