Healthcare fiasco: Family member diagnosed with terminal tumor, denied request

Absurdity in modern-day America is…

“The fact that the San Antonio Spurs managed to blow a 29-point lead last week as they lost the NBA championship to the NY Knicks?”

No, that’s not it.

“How about a guy like Texas AG Ken Paxton, who has enough baggage to sink a naval carrier, beat a relatively decent guy like John Cornyn in last month’s GOP primary?”

No, that’s not it either. It is the fact that we can spend approximately $2 billion a day on an unprovoked war, while enduring a national deficit nearing $40 trillion, but we can’t find the money to care for the sick among us.

When the illness turns fatal, then you find yourself getting really upset over the injustice that is modern-day America.

A Fatal Illness

Take, for example, my dear cousin Anne. She is currently under home hospice after being handed a terminal diagnosis for a tumor that formed in her sinus cavity.

I think I have it right. I just don’t want to ask her again for the name because every time I call her, I try and steer the conversation away from death and dying. But like she says, there is no getting around it.

“I wake up with death every morning,” she told me recently or words to that effect.

Which makes all my problems relatively insignificant. Every time I think I have something to gripe about, I think of my cousin.

The problem with Anne’s type of cancer is that it’s like pancreatic cancer in a way, or ovarian or colon. By the time symptoms start to develop, it’s often, not always, but often too late to save the patient.

In my cousin’s case, actually first cousin once removed (she was my mother’s first cousin), she spoke with her doctor about unexplained weight loss, and it was her physician who wanted to get her scanned. A PET scan, which can cost up to approximately $12,000.

One of our nation’s largest health insurance carriers, UnitedHealthcare, with an annual NET PROFIT of between $12 billion and $15 billion, denied the request.

Even Anne says there is no way of knowing if the outcome would have been the same, but she would have had a better chance of survival if the cancerous tumor had been discovered before more serious symptoms developed.

Because by then, almost all hope had already vanished.

It’s a hell of a deal, though, that someone like my sweet, dear cousin can pay into “the system” her entire life, have health insurance, but be denied a medical test by an insurance company making billions in net profit per year.

One of the biggest “red flags” in modern-day medicine is unexplained weight loss.

Yet, United said no to a PET scan.

Meanwhile, the grifters running D.C. want to bump up the Defense Department’s annual budget north of $1 trillion for the first time in history, and it looks like it’s going to get it.

With the extra money, we can go out and kill more people, rather than spending the money here at home to save more people.

Like my dear, sweet cousin who now, as she puts it, wakes up every day to face death.

Talking to her over the phone while she makes another medical appointment from her home in Tennessee, I’ve told her before, “I don’t know how you accept the inevitable with such grace.”

She tells me, “I don’t fear death; I just fear pain.”

Thankfully, she has a doctor who has assured her that she doesn’t have to worry about that. He’ll make sure she doesn’t suffer.

So when I see these elected psychotic grifters in D.C. running the country into the ground, spending money on wars, killing people, as opposed to subsidizing health care so future PET scans won’t be denied, excuse me if I sound just a tad bit p*ssed off at the entire corrupt system.