My universe for health care

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

It’s hard to be funny about health care.

Especially when my own access to it is nonexistent.

Yep – I’m one of the 50 million or whatever the number is now Americans who don’t have health insurance.

See, I thought it was a great idea to go out on my own and start a media company – you know, and be one of the citizens in citizen journalism.

The problem with that – try paying for health insurance on an honest small businessman’s take-home.

Yeah. Ouch.

I remember telling an acquaintance in the world of government and politics about this a few months ago.

He asked me, “So … what do you do when you get sick?”

“Uh … I don’t get sick,” was my response.

And that’s that – I don’t have the luxury of getting sick, of going to the doctor when I sprain my ankle playing basketball, which happens, of not having to take out a loan when I get stung by a yellow jacket (like I did last summer) and have to go to the emergency room when my leg swells up to three times its normal size.

We’re doing well enough in the business – more than getting by, really, which is more than I can say for my days back before we struck out on our own and instead collected the pittance of a twice-a-month paycheck that we’d get from the big media company that we worked for previous to this.

The big difference – back then, we could afford to get sick, because we had company health insurance.

Now, no health insurance means, well, it means the world, honestly.

I worry every morning when I wake up that something is going to happen to me that is going to break me financially and then as a result in just about every other way.

And knowing how insurance companies are about pre-existing conditions and the like, I’m not even convinced that that magical day that will come when I can afford health insurance again will mean that those days of concern are over.

It only takes some little cell that has been mutating without my knowledge for years to make itself known to a doctor to get me disqualified from coverage and back out on the health-care street, as it were.

So let’s score this for those following at home …

I don’t have health insurance now, am not convinced it would do me any good even if I did …

Somebody tell me what’s so bad about universal health care.