BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG DISAPPOINTMENT *

(*With all due respect to my good friend @JayMcInerney)

You are not the kind of guy who would be in a place like this at this stage of Obamacare.  With your biography, you could've been its poster child, but now you're in danger of becoming one for the opposition.

By now, everyone has an Obamacare story to tell.  While the Administration touts the 8 million Americans who signed up, many for the first time, others grumble about bureaucratic nightmares, abrupt cancellations, or online-exchange glitches. You've suspected the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but now you feel you've been had. You—an informed consumer who advocated for such reforms for years.

You hate yourself for writing this, providing fodder for antagonistic Republicans.  It gives you what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.  As a self-employed professional with pre-existing conditions up the wazoo—quite literally, actually—you craved the basic fairness of the Affordable Care Act.  Before it, your only option was an outrageously expensive PPO that paid 70 percent of in-network doctor bills and 50 percent of so-called "customary rates" for out-of-network services.  For this you forked over the princely sum of $10,408.80 a year in premiums. 

But as a "high-risk patient," you were grateful for what you got.  You were born with a neuromuscular weakness called spinal muscular atrophy; you've never walked or stood, and your lungs are so weak that a bad cold could kill you.  People like you can't be too choosy about their health insurance.  Employers rejected you, though you'd graduated from Harvard with honors.  The only work you could secure were freelance magazine assignments.  As an independent contractor, you had to secure your own coverage.  But when you aged out of your parents' policy, in the late-1980s, you couldn't buy health insurance at any price.  So you joined organizations—the National Writers' Union, the Media Alliance, etc.—just to score a group plan that didn't require a medical examination.  Still, carriers kept dropping you.  They called you too expensive.

The Clinton Administration brought passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which enabled you to purchase insurance without any pre-existing-condition exemptions if you had proof of prior coverage.  A terrific help, this is how you ended up with the pricey PPO.  You clung to it for years. 

But last October you received word that it was ending, thanks to the ACA.  No worries.  You would be automatically shunted into a new policy that slashed your premiums in half and cut your co-pays to practically nothing.  Even when the application process faltered, you defended the new order.  Friends and family held you up as an example of its success.

Granted, your gratitude waned when you learned the new, cheaper plan excluded your local hospital and its doctors.  But soon, undeterred, you found a competitive policy and made the switch before the cutoff date.  Progress is always bumpy, you told yourself.

You were so innocent.

The weeks that followed were filled with obtaining authorizations for ongoing prescriptions.  Some had to be transferred to a new mail-order pharmacy.  Small hassles, to be sure, but you believed this was a phase that would pass.  Only when your primary physician suggested you consult a specialist—a cardiologist for a routine scan--did a true sense of panic dawn.   "The doctor won't see patients with any of the new plans," the receptionist politely but bluntly informed you. 

Ditto the second and third cardiologist referrals.  Next, your beloved urologist, whom you found only last year after rejecting several others, said essentially the same thing.  Even your long-time gastroenterologist and colorectal surgeon (six years ago you had a colectomy, hence the wazoo reference) blackballed you.

It seemed impossible.  You had been so careful, so sure.  A physician friend explained that the new plans are simply not paying doctors a fair and adequate rate.  Doctors who accept them are losing money.  This is how insurers are making up for what they've had to give up under Obamacare.  Soon, your friend cautioned gloomily, many doctors could go out of business.  It could become practically impossible to find any doctors willing to practice.

You do not believe it.  Obamacare couldn't be the end of medicine as we've known it.  Yet for now, you have to choose between seeing specialists you don't want or paying full-freight for ones you do.  In which case, why have insurance at all?  Then you remember: you don't have that choice anymore.

You are stuck—stuck with a cheap plan that doesn't serve your needs.  It doesn't matter that you went for the "platinum" option, foregoing tax breaks you might have received from the state-sponsored exchange.  It's still no good.  You even asked your broker if there's any kind of supplemental, stopgap policy you could purchase.  She said no.  You can't change anything until the next open enrollment in mid-November. 

Will there be a better choice then?  You can only hope.

Ben Mattlin
Author of Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved my Sanity
Los Angeles, CA

TAKE YOUR SEATS

The realization came in the course of searching for a new cushion for my wheelchair.  I use a wheelchair every day, all day long, and have my whole life.  Born with spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative neuromuscular delight, I've never stood or even tied my own shoes--but I know a thing or two about wheelchairs and have bought cushions before.  This time turned out to be a fiasco.
 
To be sure, I could easily have purchased any number of standard cushions.  Your basic off-the-drugstore-shelf variety, however, wouldn't provide the support and comfort I sought.  My skinny, bony backside requires something more high-end and expensive.
 
From magazine ads and Web chatter I knew there were several new types of cushions on the market.  Until five years ago I used a fancy kind of memory foam.  Then I spent a grueling three months in the hospital, largely due to botched surgery, and developed my first (and so far only) pressure sore—a big, ugly, open wound on my tailbone.  When I at last returned to my wheelchair, my doctor recommended an air cushion to promote healing. 
 
I never really liked it, but it's been okay.  Then, recently, my right leg has been falling asleep.  So it's time to consider a change. Gel-filled? Hybrid foam-air? Latex-topped?  I called the local wheelchair clinic, which turned out to be not what it used to be.  I was asked for a doctor's prescription before making an appointment.  Which I did.  At the appointment, after presenting my insurance card and proffering my $20 co-pay, I was led to a depressing space where a beleaguered employee reviewed my paperwork and declared I needed to speak to someone else, who would call me in a couple days.  "Let me make sure we have your insurance information," he inserted before I disappeared. 
 
Only after driving away did I begin to think about how Blue Cross was going to be billed for a consultation I hadn't actually received.
 
But that was just the beginning.  Days went by, with no phone call.  So I called and emailed.  When I finally spoke to the seating specialist, she immediately suggested I might be underestimating the problem, wanted me to consider getting a whole new chair and possibly a new bed!  "Let me look into cushions first," I insisted.
 
She then proceeded to tell me she'd have to check my insurance before we could talk further. 
 
But that familiar insurance drill is only part of the problem.  First, there's the ridiculous, dim-witted, inefficient bureaucracy for even the simplest procedures such as choosing a wheelchair cushion.  More irksome still is the arrogance--the way we the customers/patients are so often treated as "cases" or faceless accounts, treated as kindly as witless children, but never respected or listened to.
 
I wanted to shout, "I don't care how trained you are—I've used a wheelchair for nearly half a century.  I am the authority here!"
 
That's when it struck me: I was experiencing a microcosm that illuminates the macrocosm: the plain, simple truth of what's wrong with our health-care system. 
 
It's not Obamacare, frivolous malpractice suits, big pharma, the declining number of doctors, the "brain drain" of young professionals who flee overseas, the aging population, nor any of the other bêtes noires that experts cite.  It's something much more prosaic and closer to home.

If the seating specialist has something useful to contribute, she deserves to be respected and paid for her time, of course.  Yet if I go into a shop--even a high-end one--I don't expect to negotiate for the sales clerk's attention; his or her compensation is rolled into the purchase price of whatever I buy.  Why should choosing a wheelchair cushion be any different?  Why are we treated as something less than customers?
 
I concede that these professionals might have ideas I hadn't thought of.  That's why I contacted them in the first place.  I'm willing to listen.  I only ask that they give me the same courtesy.
 
Granted, this is but one little example.  Still, if this sort of condescending, time- and money-wasting nonsense goes on on such a small scale, imagine what's happening when there's real money involved!
 
Yes, there are bigger concerns—outrageous malpractice suits, greedy drugmakers, physicians who play God, and so forth.  But let's not be blindsided to the everyday, small-time pilfering and patronizing to which people like me have grown all too accustomed. 
 
Perhaps the solution to what ails our health-care system lies not from the top down but from the bottom up.  Tip O'Neill used to say all politics is local.  Maybe the same is true here.  You want to know what's wrong with the system, look no further than your neighborhood wheelchair dispensary.
 
###

I AM the health-care debate

The health-care arguments and counter-arguments may aim at and ultimately impact everyone, but perhaps no one more than me. How can I make such a preposterous claim? Simple.

First, I have a pre-existing condition. I was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a severe, degenerative neuromuscular weakness. I've never walked or stood, and have limited use of my upper body.

Having a pre-existing condition is not so big a problem insurance-wise as it used to be. In the Clinton administration, new regulations were passed that basically require insurance companies to accept a subscriber with pre-existing conditions if he or she was covered by another insurance carrier in the past year. This made a big difference in my life. Still, for that coverage, I have to pay an arm and a leg. Yes, even if they're an atrophied arm and leg.

That's largely due to the second reason I'll be deeply affected by health-care reform. Because of my lifelong disability, I've never been able to land a real job. Despite graduating with honors from Harvard College 25 years ago, I've only received temporary, short-term assignments, never full-time employment. Thus I have to go shopping for my own health insurance.

When Obama opponents worry that he wants the government to take over health care, I don't listen. (A) It's not true. And (B), if it were true, I'm not sure that would be so bad. The government couldn't do a worse job than the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

When they call Obama's plan Socialist, it's meaningless to me. Considering what rampant capitalism has done to our economy and our health-care-delivery system as I've experienced it, Socialism begins to sound pretty good.

But when the right wing cautions that a government insurance option will lead to rationing of medical services, that's when I take note. I know that when it comes to rationing I'll get the short end. Those of us with significant, continuous disabilities are a bigger draw on the nation's scarce health-care resources. I know that's true. If you're counting dollars and cents, keeping people like me alive and healthy just doesn't add up.

I know this, because I already feel the squeeze of rationing from the managed-care system we have today.

Don't get me wrong. I've been lucky. But the question of whether it's worth providing equal quality medical care for someone like me, a 46-year-old quadriplegic (who also happens to be a husband and father of two daughters), became dangerously clear last year, when I was hospitalized for gastrointestinal infection and septicemia. I was unconscious, inches away from death, I'm told. Before the doctors would perform their magic, they asked my wife, "Are you sure you want us to do this?"

In other words, should should they provide me with the same degree of life-saving intervention as they would anyone else?

So for me, the risks of bureaucratically controlled medicine and rationing already exist. I only hope the Obama plan--or whatever reform ultimately passes, and I do hope something does--will include a provision to guarantee equal access for all, including or perhaps especially the one in five Americans who has a disability.