Our family used to have health insurance. We paid through the nose for it — in 2007, it cost us $2000 a month. My husband is self-employed. There are no jobs in his field, especially for people his age.
During 2008 and 2009, my husband’s income decreased to 1/3 of what it was in 2007.
Mind you, we did not take vacations. I took the kids tent camping at a state park for years, which was very frugal. Our cars are 9 years old. We don’t have large wardrobes, boats or other recreational vehicles, we didn’t live in a McMansion, we lived low on the hog. We had to. It is expensive to finance a largish family.
We went through our savings. We had to drop the health insurance, which then cost $2500 a month, because we didn’t have the money to pay for it.
The problem is ME - my health. I had double coronary artery bypass surgery when I was 45 years old. My left main artery was 96% blocked. That’s the artery that is called the widow-maker. The other artery was also over 90% blocked.
The cardiologists could not figure out how I was still alive. I had no risk factors for this, which added to the mystery.
Two months after heart surgery, I had an angioplasty in a third artery and a stent put in the left main artery — they were both blocked over 70%. I had a very hard time persuading the doctors to do a cardiac catheterization because I’d just had the bypass surgery. They thought it was the stress of having so many kids and homeschooling that caused my physical problems!
So, I have severe left main artery disease, and no insurance. The drugs I am supposed to be taking cost $600 a month. I am not under a cardiologist’s care because we cannot afford that.
I’ve been looking for a job for over a year. I haven’t found one. We moved to another state 9 months ago, and there are no jobs here, not even at fast food places.
And that’s okay with me. Why? I’m not lazy, but I no longer have the stamina to work two jobs — a paying job and taking care of my house and family.
We had to move to another state because the cost of living in Mass was far too high. We lost our house, which was under water on the mortgage, and we couldn’t sell it due to the housing market. We didn’t have an ARM. We didn’t have a no-money down mortgage. We just couldn’t afford the payments any more. Our rent here is about 40% of our mortgage payment - cheap, because the house is tiny and it is in a rural area.
My husband very regretfully filed for bankruptcy yesterday. It took me a year to persuade him to do that, but it was our only option.
I’ve decided to go with prayer as my option. If I die, too bad. I hope I don’t, because my kids are in high school and they need me.
Thank God the rest of the family is healthy. It is much cheaper for us to get medical care for the kids ($75 per doctor visit) than it is to have health insurance.
Anyway, not all of us who are without health insurance are government teat-suckers. Some of us just plain have bad luck. All the pre-planning in the world would not have prevented what happened to us. We were blindsided by forces beyond our control.
I would like to point out that, although we paid a lot for our health insurance ($2500 a month in 2009), the health insurance paid out a lot more than we ever paid into it.
Treating my heart problems was very expensive.
I was hospitalized for 6 weeks during my first pregnancy. That was very expensive.
Our first babies were triplets and they were born 13 weeks premature, and weighed between 1 lb. 6 oz and 2 lbs. They had significant medical bills from being in the neonatal intensive care unit for 3 months. They were also in serious condition, medically, for the first year, and had 9 surgeries total in their first 6 years of life.
We had an R.N. come to our house for 8 hours a day, and a home health aide for 6 hours a day, all paid for by insurance. Leaving aside the fact that these people were from the bottom of the barrel, and frequently did not show up for work without warning, this was paid for by our insurance.
They are all healthy now, except that one has extensive vision problems due to having retinopathy of prematurity.
The doctors gave us the choice of aborting them because mine was a high risk pregnancy. We would not consider it and we were shocked to be told in detail about the option.
So, I’m glad we had insurance while we had it. I’m in no position to beef about the cost of it to our family.