I was at a party last night (I know! Me at a party! WTF!), about a dozen of us, graduate students, professors, two ornithologists (yes! really! they are part of the team tracking the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!), media specialists, a guy who used have a lucrative career with Cox Cable before he got fucked by downsizing, and we had been drinking and talking birds and universities and politics and our wicked youths, the sorts of things one does discuss in NW Arkansas at this sort of party, but invariably, as usual these days, the party devolved to the discussion of hospitals, doctors, and medical debt.
Everyone of us at that party, and nearly all of us, mind you, had actual jobs, and all of us had actual insurance, but all of us are up to our chins in medical debt, and most of us have been turned over to collection agencies by various doctors and hospitals: this despite have insurance, this despite paying on the medical bills we have to the best of our ability (not very well, since medical bills and medical insurance are now eating up about a fifth of my take-home income). We're standing there in a huddle at the party swapping tactics on how to deal with collection agencies and hospital billing departments, desperate as outlaws, people who have, in fact, paid for their health care, because none of us had ever missed an insurance payment, while meanwhile the insurance companies, last I heard, post larger and larger profits, as do the drug companies.
Then? This year? I get the fine news from my university that they will be raising our insurance premiums. Oh yay.
Pass the damn bill.
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