Caring about health care

I would bet that the folks who make major decisions about health care in this country are all very well insured themselves - isn't that funny - ha!

Anyhow, I came across this article today in the NY Times "Cancer Society Focuses Its Ads on the Uninsured"

This is an exciting development and one which I hope builds up to a fevered pitch by the next presidential election. While other countries may have some problems with their health care systems (I mean those that even have systems), and while we are a country based on (supposedly) keeping the government out of our lives as much as possible, obviously the track we are on now is not the right one.

To be truthful, I am more than a little despondent about the state of coverage in the U.S. My own mother was ill for many years. She kept going to doctors and hospitals here and they didn't want to run extra tests that might have told them she had cancer.

It was only when she moved back to London to take care of her own ailing mother and got into the National Health that her Lymphoma was discovered. It was a slow-growing variety and she has been done with treatments (or poisonings as I refer to them) and in the clear for over a year now. However, they assured us that this was something that had been brewing for a long time.

What ifs are rarely useful, but I find myself wondering how much easier would it have been and how much less would she have suffered if the Doctors here could have just run those tests? Maybe she wouldn't have to live the rest of her life with such sever chest pains from the scar tissue that the chemo left behind.