Why we need national single-payer healthcare
When Danna Walker left the second-floor conference room and returned tearily to her desk — where someone had already deposited a packing box for her belongings — her first thought was not of the 14 years she had worked for DHL or the loss of her $37,000-a-year salary.
It was of Jake. In three months, once her benefits ran out, how in the world would she provide health insurance for Jake, her mountainous, red-headed 21-year-old son, who had learned three years earlier that he had metastatic testicular cancer?
Since the day she was laid off in October, Ms. Walker and her husband, Russ, co-owner of a struggling feed store here on the outskirts of Houston, have mounted a largely fruitless quest to find affordable coverage for Jake’s pre-existing condition. Their odyssey has become all too familiar to millions of newly uninsured Americans who suddenly find themselves one diagnosis away from medical and financial devastation.
The Walkers, both 46, are among nine million people who have lost employer-sponsored insurance since December 2007, according to projections by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Some have qualified for government insurance, and others have bought individual policies. But an estimated four million have joined the ranks of the uninsured, heightening the urgency in Washington to close the coverage gaps in American health care.
Like many others, the Walkers live on a knife’s edge of risk. Without insurance to cover her high blood pressure or his diabetes, they defer doctors’ visits when possible and obtain their prescriptions — nine between the two of them — for $4 apiece at Wal-Mart.
But their primary concern has been finding insurance for Jake, who, after four operations, two stem cell transplants and round after grueling round of chemotherapy, has been cancer-free for a year.
He continues to face …
