Health care stinks.

While I can be political amongst my friends, I try not to do so on the internets. I have my personal views on a lot of issues, but they require process to explain and some nuance. American politics are not fond of nuance. So I'll skip them over. If you are ever interested in having a beer with me, I'll go into detail of where I think our two main parties fail. I'm wrong most of the time, and know it, so I look forward to hearing your views as well, provided they aren't screechy. My main rule of thumb is you will not find salvation in your political party, so don't even try.

But since this blog is about our experiences with infertility, it's difficult to not talk about the problems we've had with our insurance coverage. It's easy to throw out a phrase like 'Death Panel', but when you've actually waited for your insurance company to decide if they will pay for something, you get the notion that all may not be right with our insurance system.

I'd like to talk about one personal experience with our health care system. My brother was diagnosed with cancer 7 years ago in October, and he died the following February. He was a seminary student, about halfway through with his studies. He went through a large surgery to remove a good portion of his cancer, had a lengthy hospital stay, followed by several rounds of expensive chemotherapy. When it was determined that the cancer would ultimately take his life, he was given wonderful hospice care and was able to die under his terms.

He actually passed away a half an hour after I arrived at my parents house on his final day on Earth. I am humbled.

I mention this story for several reasons. One, he was severely underinsured. Many young folk think they can swing staying healthy and skip insurance payments. If you're in school, you can't afford insurance, and you're 30 years old, it seems like a great idea until something catastrophic happens.

My brother racked up $200-300,000 dollars in medical debt during the four months he spent fighting his disease. What young person could payback that much money? He wouldn't have been able to. He died, and none of his bill was paid back to the hospital. The hospital makes up that payment by charging extra to people who can pay, or who have insurance that will pay. The next time you get treatment at a hospital, and are charged in exorbitant amount for a cheap-o medication, know that you are paying for someone else's treatment.

If my brother had survived, he would have been bankrupt. He would end up like many in our country: one catastrophic illness, and kiss-your-American-dream-goodbye. The hospital still wouldn't have received the entire payment, and you would still be paying out the nose for aspirin. Moral of the story - you get sick; you never make it out of debt. And everyone in America pays your debt through higher hospital bills.

In my job, if a system is causing everyone to fail, you realize that the problem isn't all the people who can't handle the system, it's that the system is broken, and you fix the system. Right now, in America, if you or a loved one gets terribly sick, you will go bankrupt. There is no way to survive a catastrophic illness without becoming a debtor for the rest of your life. The health care system is and has been broken for quite some time, and needs to be fixed.

Angie can talk at length about how she knew something was wrong with her, and her doctors couldn't figure out that she had endometriosis. If she had been given the diagnosis sooner, she could have gotten it removed, and remediated and given therapy sooner. She could have chosen her own path to fertility. This is obviously not health insurance problem, but a lousy doctor problem, but if we did have a system of best practices, she may have gotten the information she needed sooner.

As I've mentioned in passing before, the best therapy for endo is pregnancy. An endo patient's body figures out what's up, and can give her anywhere from 5 years to indefinite balance of estrogen. Getting an endo patient pregnant is the hard part. It's difficult to say what the actual problem will be, since each patient is different, but it can affect quality of the eggs, the shape of the ovaries, it can create blockages of the fallopian tubes, and it can prevent embryo implantation. How can you solve all of these problems? IVF! Yes, evil IVF, which most insurances won't cover, which can cost $30,000 per cycle, and oh, yes, you might need to go through a few cycles before you get it right. I'll talk about our experiences in IVF another time.

It's considered evil by some for a few reasons. Some say it's playing God. It's actually only helping the process along by uniting a sperm and an egg, so I don't have time for people who use this argument. The other argument that is used is that it creates extra embryos which are frozen and stored. Since there is some risk to freezing embryos, this is considered on par to abortion.

Look, I can't solve your fears on this one, but speaking for an infertile couple, you need a back up plan. If you can create extra embryos, you can use them down the road for another try, or another child, or you can choose to put them up for adoption. Seriously. I'll talk about embryo adoption more another time.

Anyway, the point is, none of the costs of IVF, from treatment to the medications, are covered by my wife's insurer. Nor are they covered by many insurers. I don't expect to get it all covered, but since the very same drugs are covered in smaller doses if a person decides to pursue an artificial insemination, why can't part of it be covered? And since this pregnancy through IVF would also be a therapy for her endo, why not cover it if it could remediate my wife's disease for up to five years (or potentially longer)?

So, now what happens to my wife? She can't get therapy through her insurance, and she can't get different insurance since she has a 'pre-existing condition' - what options do we have? THIS.IS.THE.INSURANCE.COMPANY.COMING.BETWEEN.YOU.AND. YOUR.DOCTOR. You can't blame a government bureaucrat for this one.

I won't go into the idiocy of the surgery I had last summer, that my insurance did pay for, but there was no rationale for why it was done, and while it did improve things, they actually didn't need to be improved. I guess I did go into it, but I'll try to talk about it more another time.