Kira McFadden 10 December 2019 Healthcare in America
79 million Americans today suffer from debt due to medical bills. In fact, 60% of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills. Most Americans cannot afford visits to the hospital even in dire emergencies. If they do go, they are putting themselves at risk of being in more debt than they can handle. I never really thought about it when I was younger, always assuming that my mom, an accountant, would be able to meet the expenses. It wasn’t until October 9, 2015 that I saw firsthand the extraordinary debt that comes from medical bills. My immediate family and I were driving back to Pennsylvania after a week long stay in Orlando, Fla. We had a fun-filled week but we were all more than ready to just be home. Beginning our drive on I-95 we were all in good spirits, never guessing what was going to come next. We had just driven into Georgia and I remember falling asleep and being woken up by my mother screaming, “Sh-t, sh-t, sh-t!” After that there was a loud crash and everything went black. I wasn’t sure what had happened at the time, only thinking to myself, “How did I end up on the ground like this?” I remember flashing lights that were way too bright and a man picking me up to put me in an ambulance. I woke up in my hospital room of Candler Hospital to see my mother looking very anxious. She had internal bruising in her leg, but the doctors said she would be fine. My siblings, however, did not get as lucky. My youngest sister had suffered a lacerated liver, my oldest a bruised lung, and my brother had lost the ability to walk (for a few weeks). Overall, we had some serious injuries, but I had hope that the doctors would handle everything and we could finally go home. We eventually did recover and were able to go home, but the problems did not stop there. The repercussions of the accident followed us, with medical bills exceeding $60,000. We’re a middle-class family so my mother is able to pay all our bills paid and still take care of other business. But with this accident, and the fact that we had to take three ambulances to the hospital, we began drowning in debt. The cost of each ambulance there was around $3,000. Now multiply that by three, and add on the expense of my entire family being in the hospital for a week, and you can guess just how much my mother was facing in medical bills. Our healthcare, Aetna, was not enough to help us out, and even today she is still paying off the costs of the accident, with a remaining balance of $15, 385. I know what people say, that healthcare is an individual’s responsibility, not the government’s. Some even believe that having free access to healthcare for all Americans would mean a decrease in the quality of care. But, in one of the richest nations in the world, there should be no reason as to why a person should be denied such a basic right. A family of five should not have to suffer for years, trying to pay off an accident that left us both physically and emotionally scarred. We should live in a world where every American is granted the right to be cared for in their time of need. By not holding this right, the American government is showing us the lack of concern it has for its citizens. After all, Walter Cronkite once said that, “America’s healthcare system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”
Candler Hospital, Savannah Ga. Photo Courtesy of MapQuest