The destructiveness is so widely known, there has to be laws that we can innact to address this.

Just last week in my “day job,” I was going through a patient’s chart and found that a drug she needed badly was denied by her prescription coverage. The appeal process basically showed why the drug was medically necessary, yet the company still denied it. The patient ended up paying the full cost for the expensive drug. (And our practice covers very, very sick patients; they can end up dead if they don’t get the drugs they need right away, and at the dose the doctors prescribe.)

It really is ALL about the money for the insurance companies. If you want to get really angry, look at the profit figures for pretty much any company you can think of. Micromanagement of physicians’ work, as well as sky-high premiums, are what make them so lucrative. Believe me, they’re not increasing the rates at which they reimburse facilities and providers, at anywhere near the rate they’re increasing premiums for consumers.

In this period without health insurance, I have experienced great love and righteous anger from other Christians. Let us all ACT on these frustrations stirred by the Holy Spirit, who cries out against such injustices and, even more, provides us as the hands and feet to address them.

The fact is, insurance companies care nothing for the people who need their services. All they care about is profit. Rather than expend minimal cost for preventative care, they simply deny coverage to people with treatable problems, shoving us off to be bankrupted when minor problems become major, or if our illnesses progress to preventing us from working altogether, pushing the cost onto taxpayers.

There is something very, very wrong when upwards of 40% of the citizens in a country where we have the very best medical care in the world, can’t afford to receive it. If you’re honest, employed, hard-working, and have a chronic or “high-risk” medical condition, it’s going to take close to half your take-home pay to buy risk-pool insurance, and even then you’re going to have to absorb sky-high deductibles and co-pays.

My solution is to make all elected legislators, state and federal, do without health insurance while in office. I can guarantee they’d finally wake up to what a huge problem we have with healthcare in this country.

I agree that this is an issue of importance to Christian people. We seem to be willing to work together only with those people who agree with us exactly on various non-essentials. Can you imagine if the various denominations of Christians banded together as a group for health insurance?? But that would mean getting our hands “dirty” by engaging in that sin-to-end-all-sins, ecumenism. You know…second only to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, to hear some tell it.

Your question about gender is insightful. Like EDs, depression affects more women than men, though not as overwhelmingly so. And even though more women than men who can afford healthcare, get preventative care (meaning, more men go to the doctor later and when sicker than women), women still have to pay more for health insurance (that is, those who can get it).

This is a complex problem, but worthy of our thinking and our action. God bless you, Heather, for writing about it and for telling your story. So many people, men and women, suffer in silence until someone lets them know they’re not alone.