$17,881

If you've been reading along, you know that a couple of weekends ago my son stepped on a nail and ended up spending three days in the hospital on IV antibiotics. The bill came today. We have insurance so the part that we have to pay is comparably small. The overall number, $17,881, is quite large.
I try very hard not to be political when I write this blog, but I'm going to make a bit of an exception about this one issue. I think we should have some sort of health insurance for every person in this country. Whether or not it's the system that is due to come into effect in the next few years doesn't really matter to me, I just think that something needs to be in place. Right now we cover the elderly because their care costs more than they can possibly pay. We also cover the poor for the same reason. According to a quick search, somewhere around 105 million Americans are covered under those programs. 48 million people are uninsured, about 8 million of them children.
What happens when you're five and step on a nail? If you have insurance, you go to the doctor when your foot gets puffy. They decide how bad it's likely to be, and you get treatment. Life goes on. What if you're one of the 8 million kids that don't have insurance? Well, hopefully it's not bad and the body will heal itself. If it's like my son though, you can either take him in and be lucky with only $18,000 in hospital bills, or you can wait. If you wait it turns into a larger infection and that infection gets into the bone. Now you're looking at a month or six weeks in the hospital and surgery and perhaps a lifelong limp. Suddenly $18K sounds cheap. You waited one day because you knew you couldn't pay. You still can't pay, but now you can't pay over $100,000 instead of $18,000. How is this better for anyone?
People in this country should be able to seek medical treatment without the fear of financial ruin. They should certainly be able to seek it for their children. We already, as a population, pay for the sum total of all of the medical services that happen every year in this country. If you can pay, you pay. If you can't pay, and you're old enough or poor enough, maybe the government pays. If you can't pay, and you don't pay, those bills don't just go away. The medicine has been used, the tests run, the care given. Those unrecouped costs are passed along to those that can pay. Let me repeat something. We already pay for all of the medicine that is practiced in the United States as a population. I simply think we should re-arrange things so that we don't have to financially destroy part of the population to do so.