Heath Insurance

I am currently battling the health insurance companies. It is a hard fight and here is the back story: This past summer, I had the fun experience of having a pneumothorax or spontaneous lung collapse. It was actually my second one (lets hope that third is not the charm). I don’t view the ailment as very serious. All it means is a four-day vacation at the hospital—doped up on western medicine’s finest medley of painkillers. I return home for a week of excruciatingly painful bed rest and in a month’s time, I am more or less in decent form.

I have health insurance--thank god for Massachusetts and its progressive health insurance legislation. However, the real inconvenience is not the missing essential organ; it is the mountain of paperwork and arm wrangling by the health insurance companies that drives me to insanity. At first, the insurance company flatly refused to cover any of my $25k medical bills. Then, realizing that they have a responsibility to cover people who pay premiums, they fight tooth and nail to pay as little as possible.

How did health insurance get to this point? How did the US medical system become one where the patient feels victimized? Although I complain, I know that the health insurance/medical system in developing countries is 10x worse. I remember one situation where government doctors in India routinely took exorbitant bribes from the poorest of the poor for routine medical procedures.

Health remains one of the key challenges when overcoming poverty for those living at the bottom of the pyramid and those living in the US. This begs the question, how are US development consultants qualified to advise developing countries about health policy? If we can’t figure it out for ourselves, what gives us the authority to push a broken system?