A student with whom I worked in our University Writing Center e-mailed me yesterday. She is battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma. They thought she was in remission after a lengthy treatment this past winter. Unfortunately, the cancer came back. She is in the process of preparing for another lengthy set of chemo and radiation treatments.

Yesterday, her health insurance company notified her that it is dropping her.

Opponents of health care reform, led by that genius Sarah Palin, are running around like Chicken Littles, screaming about “death panels” that will sentence our old people to death. Folks, I hate to tell you this, but the death panels are already here! And they don’t care how old you are; they care only if you are hurting their bottom line.

I hear Republicans whining about how high our taxes will be if we go through with health care reform. We’ll lose jobs in the health insurance industry when companies cannot compete with the public option. Why should we have to pay for other people’s bad decisions?

But we are already paying large amounts of money, even if we have health insurance! I pay crazy premiums for insurance that covers only a small amount of the cost when we get really sick. And I’m already paying for those people who make “bad decisions.” What happens to medical costs when homeless people or those who are deliberately unemployed and uninsured go into an ER 50 times a year? They aren’t paying. The hospitals roll the loss into the fees they charge the insurance companies and their paying patients. WE pay!

Besides, that’s a very small percentage of the people we’re talking about helping. What bad choice did my student make? Her parents are upper middle-class residents of Geist. She is working and going to school. She didn’t get cancer because of something she did. But her insurance is dropping her because she’s costing too much. Which is the very reason she had insurance in the first place. You think she can get individual insurance while she’s in the middle of chemo? PRE-EXISTING CONDITION! So now her parents have two choices: watch her die or go bankrupt paying as much as they can out of pocket until they run out of money. And then we come back to my first point: they’ll declare bankruptcy, the hospital will eat the loss and roll into YOUR charges the next time you get sick.

As for job losses in the health insurance industry, believe me, it is scary. My husband works for one of the largest health insurance companies in the nation. But if a public option means his CEO takes home only $1 billion instead of $6 billion, I can be okay with that. And if my husband’s company has to lay him off because it can no longer charge the exorbitant premiums it currently charges, I can be okay with that too. We’ll adjust. And I will love not having to pay those high premiums for lousy coverage any more!
I’m very tired of the health care debate. It’s exhausting. I’d really decided I wouldn’t write about it anymore, but then I got this e-mail.

My 23-year-old student has been sentenced to death. By her health insurance company.

Enough said.