I am now just a statistic.

I now belive that I am a statistic. Since I no longer have a full time job I don’t have health care for my son. This has now reached “boy oh boy” status. My son has been sick over the last couple of weeks. At his school there is a policy that if your child has a  fever or a cold he has to be sent home. I mean that is understandable when you consider the Swine flu and all. However, I did the parents code by buying the decongestants, the Tylenol fever reducer, the cough syrup and such. His symptoms simmered down for a  minute. So after missing 3 days of school he bravenly went back. I received a call later that  morning from the school saying that my son had thrown up in class and that the nurse said that he had a fever of 99.5. Again he needed to be sent home. I went to go pick him up and brought him home. Now since I have always basically been either full time employed or contracting, health insurance wasn’t an issue. Now however, I needed to find out what was wrong with my son and I needed to know pronto. I called to see if I qualified for Medi-Cal. This was a complicated venture because even though I wasn’t working full time, because of assets and back account balance, etc.. I didn’t qualify. Now I am a veteran so my health care is covered for life. My options for my son though were null. I was now forced to take him to the emergency room. Upon arriving at the emergency room, we waited around 1 1/2 hours to get to see the Triage Nurse. When I explained my sons symptoms she promptly asked me for my insurance arrangements and/or card. I explained to her that we didn’t have any insurance. She stated that we could see a doctor but we would be billed at the end of the visit. The nurse took my sons temperature and sent us back to sit down and wait. We finally got to see a doctor and the doctor feels around on my sons lungs a bit, looks into his eyes and listens to his heart. He promptly tells us that my son most likely has allergies and informs me to get him some Claritan and to have him take it once a day or as needed for allergy flare-ups. Total time seeing the doctor was around 15 minutes. We were billed $500.00.  That didn’t  include the Claritan either. Is this the state of health care today for the uninsured? I don’t believe that I fit the category that I hear most of the radical conservatives preaching about. About how some people just don’t work, or some people just don’t deserve the government influx of debt  that they feel they would be respnsible for helping to pay back because we are not tax paying productive citizens. Not their version  anyway. I have fought for this country, I have provided personal protection for many celebrities during my stint as a bodyguard. I  have been a software engineer, database administrator, network engineer, entertainer and writer. I feel that I am as intelligent or  more so than most people I meet. I am a good father. So my son isn’t worthy of health care without being ripped off? What does $500.00 per 15 minutes of care work out to as an hourly wage anyway? Oh I know, $2000.00. If we had been there an hour,  would the doctor had taken a urine sample from my son? Maybe even drawn some blood? Don’t those sound like some reasonable  things to do if you’re trying to ascertain what is wrong with him? We are people right? The last time I checked my son and I were  good people. We care about our family and friends and the state of our country. It apparently doesn’t care about us in the health insurance capacity. The funny thing is that our current President and some of the democratic congress want to help. They are just being met with resistance and hypocrisy. Maybe this little small instance of how the current health care system doesn’t work will be clear and simple enough for some of those critics to understand. Believe me when I tell you, I am certain that my story here is just a pimple on the major wound in health care that around 47 million people run into daily. Lets band together people and present our case. We are more powerful than a locomotive. We are able to reach tall buildings in a single bound. Look up into the sky people.

We can do better.

This is not just my opinion, and I don’t believe that I’m wrong.