"LOL! obviously posted by a healthy and fit person who is able to work. get a few years on you and an unexpected illness and id like to hear your opinion. Lets see how the insurance companies treat you."
He don't know me - or a lot of other things out there in our world - does he Jim? "Healthy?"
Even though my cancer - for the past 17 years - has been determined as service-connected from my documented history of exposure to known carcinogens while both in the military and civilian Forest Service employment..and as such is not only 100 percent compensatable, but diagnosis, treatments, and long-term care as well a 120-percent disability income are indeed the obligation of you, the taxpayer to underwrite. So goes the mandate of the V.A. and certain inalienable rights of those who bore the burdon of battle for your right to make "obvious" assumptions without malice or forethought, certainly without knowing the simple facts.
I elected to underwrite - so far the total we're able to track and show - the entire cost associated with my second bone-marrow-transplant, it's follow-up programs,an additional stem-cell transplant and the after care and late-effect related treatments up to and including a heart transplant and it's clinical follow-up which is still in process...nine years later. I recently discovered by routine physical, some new treatment-related tumors that both the initial clinical visit, the biopsies, and what's now a tiresome series of frustrating research for treatment clinical trials (I cannot ever receive any more CHOP or TBI or high-dose monoclonal antibody therapies due to my past treatment extremes) that I hope to find, by chance, that can qualify me as a patient.
Again, I have been writing checks out of my own (and some very caring close-friend supporters) to pay for not just all-the-above, but thousand of little expenses expected through so many years of this crap. My country 'tis of thee.
The last this I would elect to do - and very well the reason I'm not just still alive but VERY functional - would be to seek the mandate I'm intitled to by rights - and seek the health care I "earned" at the V.A. and/or the NCI/NIH and have you pay for it - as your obligation of being a citizen of the U.S. and obviously one of the reasons you think govt. should stay clear of our health care. It's your government - by proxy you, that gave me this lymphoma while I honorably served and now we know, wasn't told of the then-known health effects so that I may have had an option of avoiding it. Maybe..orders are orders we don't question them, right?
To date well over 3.5 million dollars of my own and my wife's income has gone towards what America has cost me, and that's the tangible loss and costs, not the largesse of the human, character, social and many many vocational and cultural opportunities lost in the interim on personal and real issues.
The article I linked to was simply to show how leaving an industry alone (less or zero regulation as you would suggest it) has resulted in the facts of where we are nationally which is why changes are mandatory. Someone of your nature and disposition and opinion was on trial, testifying under oath at discover when we were in litigation in the discovery phase of the Agent Orange Class action againt Dow, the U.S.A., Monsanto, DOD, etc., that Idustry could've gotten away clean with the toxicity issue of liability and fault - if they could've been allowed to manufacture and sell without having to tell the govt. - albeit years later - that they knew the componants of the two herbicides used in Agent Orange tested as a potent human carcinogens and Lymphoma was one of the rare cancers known then that caused delayed occurance of NHL. They knew, then the govt. knew, they denied and lied until we sued, and the rest is history but everyone seems to have forgotten something. I entered as a class co-plaintiff as did thousands of others, but never touched the settlement, no one I know has either.
They lied, as per the article I linked to indicated as well, the merits and management of the insurance industry, especially in these times.
So warming to know you not only support such actions by business towards the people, but resist efforts to control such blatant violations of trust and displays of sickening greed, at the cost of American's lives and livelihoods.
You never had to pay for my health care, you should be thanking me. However I feel that my illness and trials with sickness and endless worries and associated pains relating to my service both for defense and domestic policies are because of people like you, who convinced me as a short-sighted teenager that enlisting for Vietnam was the patriotic and responsible thing to do, like keeping private big-business responsible only for themselves and stop government from policing them, stop lawyers from suing them, and they'll keep all our best intrests at heart. The mantra of the Tea Party, the GOP, Wall Street and the select few of Dow, Monsanto, Conagri, seems a lot like it did when the last eight years of their policies and the impacting results because of, are the situation we and world are in now - but we forget I guess.
I'm not just a cancer and multiple transplant (including hard organ) survivor, I'm a thriver. I own my own business...I climb daily (weather permitting), carry more than full liability (which I've never filed a claim on, property or injury), and consider myself much healthier and physically capable than many others I know - even with current active and growing metastasized/related tumors on my face, in my neck, on my chest and under my spleen (so far, just those we know about). I'm also an old timer - over half a century old...which I consider often a plus because along with those years came earned experience - much at high cost - of what is in government, what was in government, and what should be in government - which by the way is (or should be)....us, the people, not the corporations which I can not understand get so much freedom advocacy from people like you while they not just continue the fraud and lies and policies of the past, they're enjoying it much more profitably now and the obvious impacts are blatent yet you seem to think it's this black president, socialists in hiding, or lazy Americans who just want more freebies.
Just my two cents - {which for me, after millions spent over the years on stuff that was never my fault and I should not even being paying for} - worth.
I'd like to know what you'd do - God forbid - if a catastrophic trauma of chronic terminal illness present itself to you or your loved one(s)...and your insurer cancels you policy and your lawyer has his litigious hands tied (GOP legislation..tort reform, eh?). Worse yet, they cover selected (they select them) proceedures and you're still facing co-pays or additional costs that come out of your pocket to the tune of bancruptcy - destroying your sense of life as you know it. That's what that article I linked this morning to was all about - just that. Ideology is a problem often because your opinions and assumptions about people more often than you think - effect real people in real situations, they are out there far beyond - apparently - your closed-in world of profits and entitlements and rights and freedoms...things that directly caused my cancers and struggles in life along with many thousands of others who blindly believed the same things...way back when but who knows more than Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh or the Dick Cheney's that influence us about what is right for America and where the problems really lie?
What more than just several large companies enjoying unparalleled profits in these times of economic destruction, caused by their very policies, are doing to America is to me no different than what Bin Laden did on 9/11, and that bold opinion is mine and my
right to express it because I paid dearly for that right, much more than any one American should ever have to pay.
My country 'tis to thee.
