More help needed

[solarbird]

vixyish points her readers to two more cases of people without health insurance; Cheyenne Wright, the colourist for Girl Genius, who recently had an "alarming" hospital stay (without insurance), and, worse, an SCA fan whose family needs help with funeral expenses following his death, a result of loss of medical coverage and job. (Diabetes+inadequate money for meds=dead.) I don't know the family of the deceased - I'm not in SCA - but I do know cleothyla through fandom.

I also don't know any of the details of Cheyenne's hospital stay. But I can tell you that over the six years of medical hell Anna and I went through ending in 2009 (touch wood), we did have insurance, sometimes through me and my self-paid business coverage, sometimes through Anna's employer. It wasn't bad coverage; some pretty high deductibles at times, but we didn't have to go to war very often with the insurance companies or anything. (Mostly billing fuckups, but nothing with intent as far as we could tell.) During this time, I got hit-and-run by a car while out biking, Anna had two rounds of thyroid tumours followed by breast cancer, and a few other things.

Our co-pay cost - the chunk we had to fork over - was over $100,000. That's just the "patient responsibility" portion (tho' it does include premiums) - the hospital stay portion alone of just my bike accident was over $150,000. That doesn't include physical therapy (some significant portions of which I delayed, to my detriment, for cost reasons), meds, and things like that. We've paid all of the direct expenses off; we have about $8,000 left in accumulated other debt we stacked up while shovelling money at hospitals. If you do the math - and I of course do - that balance is entirely from interest payments, not money we actually spent on things.

Cheyenne doesn't have health insurance. Whatever his total bill is, he's looking straight at it.

So. If you can, go clickie and throw a few bucks at people. It won't help fix the system, but it'll help some individuals, and that, at least, is worth doing.

Comments

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

According to the _Girl Genius_ e-mail list, Cheyenne's medical problems turned out to be less serious than first thought, but still required a hospital stay. So, he still has hospital and other medical bills. He's already back at work for Studio Foglio, coloring the strip.

[solarbird]

Well, thanks for small favours then. But he still has bills to pay.

[denelian.livejournal.com]

it may seem weird, but i just posted it on the comm for me. [w000! don't i sound all stuck up when i say that! lol]

both of them, actually. :(
fucking "death panel" bullshit, fucking republicans who blocked this is 93 just !!!!!!!


erm. sorry for the ranty there. sigh.