Have you been working hard and paying your bills on time your whole life? Saving your money and trying to get ahead, looking forward to retiring some day? You read in the paper and hear on the news about so many people that are uninsured. Uninsured, and don’t have health insurance because they can’t afford it. Are you one of the uninsured people like I am? Are you worried about having a health care emergency and not knowing how you would pay your medical bills? You know you really can’t switch jobs. You feel you’re getting too old or under skilled to be hired by anyone else. You might even be self-employed too. You know you can’t or don’t want to learn a new skill to get a new job at a bigger company that has group health insurance. Your present employer really can’t afford health insurance for his employees and you don’t see that changing where you work.
You have gotten by this long without health insurance and you know that you should do something about it. But health insurance is expensive and getting health insurance is a good idea and something you have always been planning to do. But, we just keep putting it off, until it is too late. So what is a man with a family, or a single person do if you barely can find the money to pay for the necessities, like the rent, or a mortgage, the higher price of gas and food, much less expensive health insurance?
Do you think you can beat the odds? For men it is one in three, for women one in five that you will have a major health care emergency hospitalization and incur medical bills for surgery, hospital stay, outpatient medical care, therapy and prescription drugs. Do you worry and lay awake at night, wondering how you would pay for emergency care, if you needed it?
Ever wonder what you will do if the worst happens and you had to go to the hospital without health insurance? In a word. Bankruptcy. The retirement you worked your whole life for and dreamed about… the retirement you always envisioned is gone…taken away from you in an instant. And by a calamity you have tried to avoid. A calamity that broad sided you, and you had no warning and you never knew what hit you.
Imagine this scenario. You are 55, been in great shape your whole life, you work hard and live right, don’t smoke, eat healthy foods, watch your weight and have been taking care of yourself the best way you know how. But lately you have been getting a little short of breath. You shake your head and say “cbdwardcom” and keep right on working on the house, the car, the lawn, the crops or a new project you just have to get done. While working, all of a sudden you feel really short of breath. You stop, sit down and can’t breathe. You look down and your arm is feeling funny and tingly. All of a sudden you feel a shooting pain running up your arm into your shoulder, “ah…just overdoing it again” you say to yourself. I’ll just rest a spell and it will go away. But this time the pain does not go away like other times. You feel the numbness and worse, a stabbing pain goes into your shoulder. Quickly the pain intensifies and travels deeper and is shooting across your chest, a crushing pain and now you are really scared. “Wonder if this is a heart attack?” You know you waited too long and it’s too late…This time it’s for real. You are in the middle of a heart attack.
