“Our nation has more people in jail than anywhere else in the world in its effort to combat crime,” Stark said. “Yet, we allow 47 million people to go without health insurance—which translates into going without needed medical care—each year. It’s time to take action and combat the real killer in our country—the lack of universal health care.”
While there are many reasons the U.S. ranks 45th in life expectancy this unseen group of middle aged Americans contribute to that lowered expectation. A study by Families USA ranked lack of insurance as the third leading cause of death for people between 55 and 64 years.
This is no luxury problem. While this has recently become a personal problem for me since I recently become an American who will be forced to work until my sixty-fifth birthday, I'm not writing about just myself. Since many public and private employers are cutting or eliminating early retirees, many near elderly are in the same boat as I am.
Presently Social Security offers early retirement to Americans at age 62 but no assistance with medical coverage until age 65. At one time employers offered a bridge to Medicare, often from an even earlier age. Now the early retiree who has the money to pay 102% of what their former employer paid has only 18 months of COBRA to fall back on.
With the cost of health care coverage even COBRA deters retirement but if forced into the so called free market by attempting to retire sooner than those 18 months prior to Medicare the near elderly become hostages to health care.
People who want to retire before they qualify for Medicare have to find insurers willing to cover them. They have to pay premiums that for a couple ages 60 to 64 average $9,200 a year, according to a study from the insurance industry. They’ll have out-of-pocket costs of close to $1,500 a year, according to the National Institute of Aging.
The numbers form a roadblock. Teachers, administrators, attorneys, maintenance supervisors and nurses who invested wisely and now want to retire are realizing they have no choice but to wait until they’re 65.
Of course those numbers come from the insurance industry and the burden would surly be even greater. During the 10 years before Medicare eligibility kicks in, those near elderly Americans have other means of dying caused by the profit based American health care market. As Americans of all ages have seen medical coverage become a greater percentage of household income and watched the co-pays and deductibles go so high that some don’t even use the coverage when they should, for the near elderly who have reached that stage of life when multiple visits to the doctor become necessary those mounting co-pays often become an even greater hindrance to continued treatment that younger Americans.
For the near elderly who can no longer do their jobs the only other answer is having Medicare awarded based on disability but the Social Security Administration's definition of disability is far different from the worker's. A person must not only be unable to do his or her previous work but cannot engage in any other kind of substantial gainful work.
It is immaterial whether such work exists in the immediate area, or whether a specific job vacancy exists, or whether the worker would be hired if he or she applied for work.
"The worker's impairment or impairment's must be the primary reason for his or her inability to engage in substantial gainful activity, although age, education, and work experience are also taken into consideration in determining the worker's ability to do work other than previous work".
By congressional law age must be taken into consideration but according to one of the many lawyers devoted to the appeal process during the beginning stages of filing a disability claim the SSA denies approximately 91 out of every 100 claims filed. Another claims that SSA denies about 60 percent of the people filing initial applications.
The most common numbers are that two thirds of the workers who file claims are given a final rejection by SSI. Of those denied benefits approximately half hire one of those lawyers and win in a long and exhausting appeal, an average wait of 669 days in some areas.
Of the millions of Americans who fail to receive early disability the choices are very few and none of them are good. Some who are deemed work worthy but incapable of doing the job they have done their entire lives attempt to reenter the workforce. They then find a new form of discrimination, a Catch-22 caused by the medical insurance industry. Since employer provided health care plans are group policies and the younger the group the lower the premiums older qualified workers are passed over for the young and healthy.
Many of them end in jobs with no coverage in lower paying jobs and spend the years waiting for that sixty-fifth birthday dipping into their retirement savings to pay for healthcare out of their own pocket. Some elect to take an early retirement package from their employer without the government safeguard and see their retirement savings rapidly depleted. Both of these groups enter full retirement age with far less money than they planed to have and are forced into an insecure retirement.
At such a late stage in life many who elect to go without coverage almost certainly will join the 700,000 Americans who declare bankruptcy because of medical expenses or the 18,000 adults in the USA who die each year because they are uninsured.
And how’s this for a double kick in the ass from our good government. Both of those groups that are forced to draw funds from their 401k’s and 403b’s in order to pay for medical coverage are forced to pay a 10% penalty to the I.R.S. if the funds are removed prior to turning fifty-nine and a half. The second group who elect for early retirement instead of taking some low paying going nowhere job become ineligible for Social Security early disability the day they elect to take an early pension plan. They have to wait till they turn 65 or become destitute and apply for Medicaid.
While those facts would make a great case for nationalized medicine or at least offering Medicare to people who have struggled and saved for years, no politician has so much as acknowledged this group of struggling Americans since former president Bill Clinton attempted and failed to offer a buy in to Medicare for early retirees and the American news outlets have just stuck their heads in the sand.
The Supreme Court recently giving the employers the green light to drop more workers can only maker matters worse and John McCain's heartless market oriented plan will offer corporate America another opportunity to wash their hands of the medical problems facing Americans;
He wants voters to think he is going after health care cost inflation. In reality, he wants to dismantle the employer-provided system that now covers over 60 percent (or about 158 million) of non-elderly Americans, forcing millions of us who now get fairly decent health insurance on the job to instead buy whatever they can find on the individual market controlled by unregulated and predatory insurance companies. And he would drive health care costs upward, not downward.
And what is the Republican nominee's answer to the million of Americans who are forced to retire early? John McCain wants to raise both the Social Security benefit and the Medicare eligibility age to 67 while Barack Obama is being derided by the media for a "new tax" with his plan of raising the cap on Social Security.
So the near elderly are left in a position where their best case scenario is to have Barack Obama elected. That way they get to be stuck working till only age 65 no matter how much it hurts, have to pay the highest insurance premiums because of their age and do without some medical attention and drugs because of the extremely high co-pays. Wonderful country this America isn’t it?
When you consider those ever increasing insurance premiums, you could call those payments a ‘corruption tax’ because a portion of those fees goes indirectly to your elected officials so they will turn a blind eye to the obvious. There is a very simple reason for the fact that the United States government spends more per capita that other nation while leaving 47 million out in the cold and forcing the middle class to work till they drop. Of course there are other reasons like the highest administrative fees on earth and all of the time and money spent toward removing coverage when a customer most need it but the real reason is lobbyist and payola.
There is a reason that the present day politician seems helpless to address these issues. Our so called health care system has been so corrupted by bribery money that anyone who speaks the truth will be ostracized by everyone else. Consider Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards for that matter. You know John Conyers and the 88 co-sponsors of H.R. 676, has anyone outside of the C-SPAN viewing audience ever heard them say anything about it?
There is a reason that the facts are being ignored by the media and television news is left with no choice as a survival mechanism. Our government redesigned the media to act that way. When the Drug companies got the green light to advertise prescription drugs, those drug companies became the bread and butter of television news. It is no coincidence that most of those drug commercials are aired between news segments. Because of their dependence on pharmaceutical advertisements the news that enters the American living rooms is tainted by that dependence.
A recent look at American Op-Ed pieces in the print media points to Americans reading about a return to “high taxes draining the economy” and “bureaucratic nightmares" caused by the plans of Democratic nominees with elderly Americans taking a backseat to "daunting budget problems." It seems obvious that once Barack Obama is sworn into office the media will create a new generation gap. A division between the working taxpaying young Americans and the elderly who will be cast as the next welfare recipient is sure to come if those newspapers want the medical industrial complex to continue advertising in their papers.
Both of the leading Democratic candidates made many health care promises to larger groups of voters but the American who saved for an early retirement and needs to rest after a long and hard career get little to nothing. A light at the end of the tunnel may have come from Clinton, who while not addressing the the real killer, medicine for profit, would have at least converted medical coverage to a mandatory expense. Americans who can least afford a garnishee on their early retirement checks would have raised one hell of a ruckus and that sort of voter involvement could have brought about real change.
Barack Obama may streamline coverage and do away with the preexisting conditions but there is no mention about the age escalation of coverage. Slightly more affordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles do little for an elderly American trying to live on the fixed income. Under Obama's plan many of the near elderly will just give up medical coverage. They will just die.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama are bad people. They just understand the power and money that would have destroyed their campaigns if they advocated removing the corporate profit from illness or stood up for nationalized medicine. It really is that bad and the medical lobby is that strong. In a nation where the drug companies own the news with commercial income and medical lobbyist own our elected officials with campaign finance it will take a whole lot more that facts to bring about a desperately needed action.
Two months ago when I learned that all of my years of saving for an early retirement had been undermined I placed a desperate comment in WYFP. That hopeless comment ended with my only sign of hope;
I’m actually clinging to one sentence that I heard from Barack Obama in that break out session at Yearly Kos "You know the Canadian plan didn’t happen overnight. It came in stages." That gave me some hope but that’s just denial of the reality of the sort of government we have working for the people. He could devote his whole presidency to nationalized medicine and it would accomplish nothing except the guarantee that there will be another president four years later.
Once Hillary concedes all we have left is some relief to uninsured Americans or at least a means for those considered uninsurable by "death by spreadsheet" hoodlums but there is a question that should be asked about who the real hoodlums are. Is it that insurance person who in order to put food on their table cause endless pain and suffering or is it the elected official who is charged with regulating that industry?
I don’t know how many millions of us there are or if we have a lobbyist group to represent us. What I do know is that if I can find work I will be forced to work full time in a very physical job far longer than I ever expected. What I'm almost certain about is the fact that I will see an early grave compliments of the elected officials that are suppose to represent myself and my peers.
Workers, the backbone of this nation, have been treated like hat in hand beggars for too long. Just compare worker’s compensation and disability to any of the other industrialized nations on this planet. Our lack of a safety net are surely another reason the workers of this nation have a lower life expectancy than the those nations with humane governments.
As an American worker I’m sick and tired of this scumbag government and nothing will ever change until Americans look at this issue for what it really is. Middle class genocide caused by elected officials who are nothing but murderers.
Do you remember "Hey, Hey, LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" Well that may have tainted the presidency of the brilliant politician who signed Medicare into law but isn't it time we ask our elected officials "How many Baby Boomers did you kill today?"
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