Last month my wife, Katie Gibson, sat with Michelle Obama during the President’s health care speech to the joint session of Congress.
In August, Kate introduced President Obama at the town hall meeting in Bozeman, Montana where we live. Kate was selected for the Bozeman event because she was once dropped by her health insurance company, something the President wanted to highlight that day. But in truth, Kate’s story includes a half dozen problems that health care reform seeks to fix.
First, let me tell you about Kate. In 1995 she was told that an inoperable tumor resulting from recurrent cancer would kill her within the year. Three years later she carried a backpack over 800 miles across Montana.
More recently Kate has had three major surgeries in four years. She quickly began to refer to each upcoming surgery as resulting “from the radiation treatments that saved my life.” Such is Kate’s ability to always focus on the positive, on what life offers rather than on what has been taken away.
It is Kate’s spirit of unwavering hope that I see reflected in President Obama, no more so than in his efforts to revamp our health care system.
During these recent years Kate and I have seen the health care system — particularly the health insurance industry — fail time and again. Here are seven areas targeted by health care reform that would have helped us:
1. Reform improves freedom of movement.
—When Kate and I decided to start our own company, we could not leave our corporate jobs with Hewlett-Packard because our insurance would not transfer with us and we could not find new insurance.
2. Reform creates critically needed insurance pools.
—We finally found insurance through a professional society (i.e., a pool that we could join). Not all people have access outside a corporation to such pools. Under most versions of reformed health care, they would.
3. Reform removes unfettered power from the health insurance companies.
—With new insurance we left HP and started a small business in Bozeman, Mont., as we had long dreamed. All was fine for several years until the insurance company raised our deductible from $5,000 to $25,000/year. We had no say in the matter and no recourse.
4. Reform eliminates pre-existing condition clauses.
—A $25,000 deductible was undoable, so we started another new insurance search and were rejected time after time for Kate’s pre-existing condition.
5.Reform creates certainty for the health insured.
—Unbelievably, after many months we did find a provider. We paid our premiums but months later the new insurer decided to drop our insurance! A policy clause gave them two years to review Kate’s case and change their minds. That won’t be the case after health care reform.
6.Reform allows the sick to focus on getting well.
—Kate was sick and facing surgery at the time so just when she should have been focusing on her health, she was instead worrying about how we would pay her bills.
7. Reform provides improved health care consumer advocacy due to government intervention.
—The Montana Insurance Commissioner’s office intervened and helped Kate enroll in a pool of high risk Montanans. Not all states have such a program, so we were lucky. For us, government worked where private insurance failed dismally.
In Bozeman President Obama said, “Katie’s story is the kind of story that I’ve read in letters everyday when I’m president when you think about the thousands who have their policies canceled each year like Katie, I want you to remember one thing: There but for the grace of God go I.”
If you have good insurance now, consider that someday you may lose it due to a new diagnosis or a lost job. If that happens then your family may — like Kate and me, like many Americans — need the government to help you. Health care reform can help assure you won’t have to follow our path.
We are hopeful that as the debate continues Americans will heed our President’s words — that we all lower our voices and see what we can learn from each other. Then we might come out with a true American plan for improving our health care system.
It will take a spirit of unwavering hope, the hope embodied by Katie’s story.
Scott Bischke, formerly of Boulder, is the author of “Crossing Divides: A Couples’ Story of Cancer, Hope, and Hiking Montana’s Continental Divide (American Cancer Society 2002).” EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
