WebMD (via FriendFeed)

First: sorry to hear about that experience; it really sucks and I hope you get better soon.

Second: this is such a perfect example of how screwed up things are. It cracks me up when the anti-national-health care folks always bring up the examples from other countries that do have national health care and try to scare you with stories of waiting an hour or more to get coverage, and that's used as an example of why it wouldn't be good. Hello! We already have that here, so what's the point?

The fact is that if you don't want a big, inefficient bureaucracy in charge of the health care industry, it's too late, because that's already the way it is. Whether it's the government or the big insurance companies doesn't really matter too much, other than the government at least has a supposed responsibility / accountability / priority to serve the needs people (and we can vote to change things we don't like), whereas the insurance companies' only responsibility is to make as much money as they can for themselves and their shareholders.

The fact that privatization results in better care at a more reasonable price because of the motivating factor of competition is a complete myth in this industry. The fact is that most Americans could never afford to choose an alternate provider, different from the one their company partially pays for as part of their benefits package - it's just too much money, so the choice is made for you by the company you work for. And of course that company will make that choice (in most cases) on factors that are heavily based on how much money it costs them, not necessarily your quality of care.

I experienced this first-hand at my previous job. I was there for about 8 years, and towards the end (over the last 4-5 years) we literally changed to a different insurance company every single year, as they renegotiated with the various providers and ended up going with the lowest bidder every time.

Added to this is the fact that since we've dealt with insane amounts of insurance related headaches in the course of Christian being sick from when he was a baby up until they finally did the surgery that fixed the problem in 2005. Over the course of that time, we learned several valuable lessons about the health care and insurance industry.

The first one is that every time I have to choose a new insurance package (which like I said above, happens frequently), I have learned to *always* go for the one that has the most coverage and fewest restrictions / hoops to jump through in order to get coverage. Even with these plans, it can still be frustrating to get the care you need in a timely manner, but with the cheaper plans it is a nightmare and a full-time job dealing with insurance denials and approvals. I've had many conversations with reps from various companies about charges being denied, and in more than one case they told me that they have policies for some situations to always deny and then wait for you to fight it before reversing that decision. (I can elaborate more, but this is already getting too long).

The downside to always going with the better coverage / least restrictions plan is that it's more expensive. A lot more expensive. We have been fortunate in that we can afford to do that, but that is not an option for a lot of people, so they are stuck with health plans that totally suck, and have no reasonable alternative.

I could go off on this for hours, so I should probably just stop. Suffice it to say that the state of health insurance is poor in the US today. Some argue that national health care isn't the answer, and that it would be a bureaucratic nightmare, but I disagree.

Sure, it could be, but I think that (just like government in general) it's possible to do it in a way that meets the needs of the people and runs as lean and efficiently as possible. The fact that it usually doesn't work that way is just an indication that it needs to be changed, not proof that it should be privatized, because privatization ends up with the same exact problems, as we can see today.