Email I sent to our representatives in DC

[Beth Gerou]

HI! I know I've been very absent in recent months but I've been ill
and unable to particpate. I'm sorry I've missed so much :(. Here is
what I sent to all our reps on Health Care Reform. I wanted you all
to read it as I think it has appropriate views and a personal story.

_____________________________________________

I am shocked and horrified to see the anti-health reform activists
accuse the Obama administration of supporting rationing or as they
have more crudely stated it; “a committee who decides who lives and
who dies.” This is one of the cruelest and most disturbing arguments
I have heard in recent years.

Obviously, the people who currently make huge profits off of the
citizens of the US in medical charges and ‘services’ have a lot to
lose here. They make huge profits on the suffering of others and how
do you think they do this? THEY RATION HEALTH CARE. “Who lives and
who dies” is already here and has been here for a very long time only
rather than having medical doctors make intelligent, informed, and
appropriate decisions based on need and individual assessments, a
group of uninterested, non-medical and totally uninvolved
administrative assistants follow scripts and guidelines in some
insurance company’s office pool after the committees have met, made
their life and death decisions in a back office and printed it up for
the lower level staff to carry out while they go play golf.

Profit, and the more profit the merrier, is the rule of our current
health care system. The companies that supply it make their gross
profits in the name of ‘research’ or expense while the citizens pay
for it by having to add their own life savings to the overpriced and
still insufficient coverages they are given by the industry.

I have MS. I have had MS for decades since I was a very young girl
apparently. I received a diagnosis only six years ago after questing
for the truth of why I couldn’t function like most other people and to
explain the neurological issues I had for over 32 years. Thirty-two
years! Because my case was not textbook-typical it needed more
investigation. My insurance companies rained down restrictions on me,
particularly when I was a younger and yet unmarried, non-mother
student. The result was that I was neglected and nickel-and-dimed
into a decline from functioning well and working two jobs over 50
hours a week, to being impaired and walking with a cane for unknown
reasons, then into a full physical collapse that I am totally
convinced could have been completely avoided if I had been given the
appropriate tests and the medication/treatments that already existed
to address my illness and limit its tremendously damaging effects in a
timely fashion and before I was so damaged by the untreated illness
that I was no longer able to recover enough to work anymore!

With even the early MS medications there was a 30% reduction of damage
in patients in the evaluations of the medication’s efficacy.
Statistically, with that 30% I could have continued working for many
more years than I did. Perhaps with a better system I could have had
children and worked so I could contribute more from my life to society
or even to pursue the ambitious hopes and dreams I had for my life.
At all the stages of my illness, particularly when I wasn’t vastly
visually affected, the insurance companies forbade the very tests I
needed such as lumbar punctures and MRIs or further specialist visits
that would have solved my issues and given me a chance to succeed in
my life and in my hopes and dreams. Instead I am living on disability
without having been able to continue in my career or even have a
family with my loving husband. I blame the insurance companies for
turning me from a college graduate with years of additional technical
training working a mid-level professional job with a decent income and
making contributions to society into a woman on disability with what
they term as “no value”! My only value now according to the insurance
companies is that I am a wife, and my contribution to the world is
solely that I give my husband companionship.

This is our current system that the ads are inciting the population to
riot to keep! How can it be that people are not shouting from the
rooftops all over the country to point out that what they are using to
bring us fear is what THEY are already doing to us? Anyone who has
traveled through the desolation of our current health care system,
outside of the grossly rich, know that they have been rationed and
judged on their value to society offhandedly and cruelly by people who
aren’t qualified to make those decisions and are certainly not
directly involved in your medical case but have access to all your
most personal information anyway and use it for your detriment.

We MUST wrest the control of our lives, our quality of life, and our
decisions over living and dying from the profit-driven insurance
companies, for-profit hospitals, and vastly unethical pharmaceutical
corporations that currently control our very existence and play with
it cruelly. We must have reform. Reform is vital to our own self-
interests not to mention the economy and the very health and security
of our nation. To listen to the bullying health care industry
lobbyists take gullible, health-care-industry-inexperienced, and
people who haven’t yet experienced medical events from our country and
incite them to riot against reform by spreading false rumors, myths,
and presenting deceptive ads non-stop on our TV sets is, in my mind,
treachery and quite frankly treasonous since I truly believe that the
entire future of our nation is at stake here. Go against reform now
and you sentence your nation to a slow and painful death … literally.
________________________________

Thanks for reading this. I hope it incites one of our representatives
to yell more loudly against the big guns that are trying to ruin all
hopes of relief for the middle class in this area.

Regards,

Elizabeth Gerou

[Ron Biendseil]

Beth,

Good letter. Help out as you are able.

Ron