My husband and I (61 and 62 years of age) had health insurance through  Blue Cross Blue Shield of VT. The only plan we could afford was the high deductible one ($5,000 stacked). We were paying  about $480 a month with no benefits. We decided to apply for Catamount Health coverage but in order to do so we had to be off  Blue Cross Blue Shield for 1 year. We took the risk and after one year got on Catamount’s Premium Assistance plan and finally were able to get good coverage. After one year on this plan we were notified upon yearly review that our income was $66.00 over the limit for premium assistance and that we would have to do a full pay of $830.00 a month.  That is unaffordable for us, (about 1/4th of our income), so we are now back to being uninsured.  Catamount turned out to be very disappointing for us. Single payer is the only true way to go for Vermonters.

My wife and I are retired teachers from CT, and we have to purchase health insurance through our last employer for seven more years until age 65. The cost of that family policy is $1,660 per month, offset $400 by subsidies from the Retirement Board and the collective bargaining agreement, which means our cost is $1,220 per month. Whatever the cost is in 2012, it will be an additional $220 out of our pockets when one of the subsidies expires. In total, we spent over $17,000 dollars this year on premiums, dental, and vision care. Thankfully we do not have any prescription needs!

My point is, when one spends 34% on health care under the present system, it is clearly time for a change. And the only sane reform is the single payer one.

I know that many folks have circumstances that are far worse..For all of us,please, let’s work tirelessly for the single payer solution.

My husband and I are currently spending $179.00/month to purchase health insurance through my employer and still have to pay a $4,000 deductible before anything is paid for. Because of this we never go to the doctor for preventative care because we know we will have to pay for it. If we had a single payer system that covered preventative care it would save money in the long-run, as people would get the care they needed when they needed it. I would be happy to pay into the single-payer system (and hopefully my employer could put the money they spend on my insurance toward it too) to actually have my care paid for without having to meet a high deductible. Please help us to achieve the single payer system in Vermont.

I am keeping fingers and toes crossed for single Payer in VT because I live on the edge of poverty and my health insurance relies on how many college students sign up for bass lessons at SUNY Plattsburgh each semester. If I don’t get enough, I don’t get health insurance. At the end of each semester I bite my nails, wondering if I’m going to get enough students signed up for the next semester to qualify for their health insurance for a few more months. It’s been like this for three years, is nerve wracking and it sucks. If there was a safety net under me of single payer in VT I would surely sleep better at night, knowing if I didn’t get enough students one semester I would still be covered.

Before I started at SUNY I worked for a small company in Burlington for 25 years and got health insurance from them. The company was sold and the new owners got rid of everyone, one by one. I was the last to go. I held on to the cobra as long as I could but it was too expensive, so I got group insurance from BCBS and had to pay to join the Chamber of Commerce so I could get their group deal. The monthly payments were draining my savings at an alarming rate and the deductible was $2,000. There was no way I could afford to pay off the deductible, let alone make the monthly payments, so I never went to the doctor. It was a serious relief to be hired by SUNY Plattsburgh- even though I go through a nail biting time at the end of each semester, wondering if I’ll get enough students next semester to get the health insurance. I am an adjunct lecturer there. I have no job security.

My husband and I have Medicare & Aetna, but Aetna has no preferred provider network in Vermont. We live in VT on a fixed Social Security pension.

Five years ago my husband was diagnosed with bladder cancer. His treatment began with a Barre,VT urologist, and within 2 years we’d incurred such significant debt as a result of the mounting 20% not picked up by Medicare or Aetna, that we were forced to search for my husband’s health care provider at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. DHMC is an Aetna preferred provider.

For the next 3 years and hereafter, we have and will have to travel 4 hours, round-trip, for his bladder cancer treatment, as we have for all our other health care treatment beyond the scope of our primary care providers here in Vermont. That is, continuing urological/oncological evaluation for my husband, including surgery to remove his bladder, ostomy, my annual mammograms, my husband’s bi-lateral knee replacement, my upcoming knee surgery, my husband’s additional orthopedic evaluations,  both of our required ophthalmologist evaluations, neuorological evaluations, CT scans, Ultra-sounds, cystoscopies, cataract surgery.

All of these specialties, though available in Vermont, have become prohibitively expensive for us, despite our having health insurance. Our medical needs require extensive, expensive, frequent and often risky travel, because VT’s  medical providers and facilities are dictated to us, made unavailable to us, by private insurance companies.

It is not the government which gets between us and our doctors, it is the corporate health insurance behemoth which controls our health care choices.

I was in my last semester of my Family Nurse Practitioner program at UVM. Vermont has a program called Ladies First, which basically covers some preventive care (like mammograms) for women without health insurance. When I was a new student I thought this was great– “Wow, in Vermont, all women theoretically have access to preventive services.” But one day at the clinic, a patient came in who had previously applied for Ladies First because she had no health insurance. She had been denied because she had a modest house and some family land (that had been passed through her family for generations) so she did not qualify for the program because she was technically over the income/asset limit (even though she did not make a lot of money by any measure). So she kept putting off going to her primary care provider. Consequently, she presented this day with a lump in her breast that had been there for a little while, which ended up being Stage IV breast cancer– basically a very bad diagnosis.

She was referred immediately to an oncologist and started chemotherapy and radiation. I don’t know what ever happened to her because she was not my patient, but my heart ached for her and her family, working so hard to pay their taxes and keep jobs, only to be denied very basic preventive services like mammograms.

It is the very epitome of what is wrong with our system: if you don’t make a dime or have anything, you qualify for health care. It creates almost a disincentive to try to make money because you only qualify for the “socialized” services if you don’t make anything. And in Vermont we have so many folks who work really hard and don’t make much, but somehow they make too much money to get any kind of free health care. And as nurse practitioner that to me is just wrong and we need to change it, make it so that everyone is covered, take out the middle-man (insurance companies) and people who profit off of sickness (again, insurance companies and drug companies). Only then can we do what is right for Vermonters, what is right for all people.

I have a chronic, genetic illness called Gaucher’s Disease, which means I need to receive an infusion of an enzyme that I am missing on a monthly or twice a month basis, at the hospital. This replacement enzyme (called Cerezyme) is extremely expensive, so much so that if my insurance has a lifetime cap on it, I am likely to exceed even a one or two million dollar cap. A single treatment costs about $20,000!

My disease is rare and only one company manufactures this enzyme. Hence, the extremely high cost of the treatment. Without the treatment, this disease can worsen, resulting in fatigue, weakened bones, lower and lower platelet counts, and enlarged internal organs such as the spleen and liver.

What I find challenging about our current health care system is that my health is tied to my being able to procure decent insurance, generally through employment, that is affordable and doesn’t have a lifetime cap on benefits. Being currently unemployed (and on COBRA) I realize I have a finite amount of time in which to figure out my next source of health insurance. Our state plan (Catamount Health) has a lifetime cap on benefits; otherwise that might be a good option.

My partner (we are not married) can add me to his plan, but it has an extremely high maximum out of pocket (I believe it is $12,000 a year for a family), which is challenging to our budget! I would love to see health insurance not be tied to employment, without a lifetime cap on benefits, and without excessive out of pocket expenses. People with chronic health issues deserve to live without the anxiety of wondering if health care is going to continue to be available to them. I hope that my personal story can be helpful to the healthcare for all campaign.

I am on a very expensive brand name drug for which there is no generic equivalent. The insurance company has dropped this drug from its formulary for 2010. The alternative nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories in their formulary are untried by me and are also expensive. The cost of this drug is so high that regardless of which insurance company is used, I would be in the doughnut hole in five months.

The irony is that the patent for this drug, Asacol, should have run out long ago, but the company that makes it has managed to prevent that by making trivial changes such as combining two doses into one bigger pill, thus preventing its becoming a generic.

It is difficult to compare the cost of one drug vs another as the companies have imposed quantity limits on the dose. My doctor has prescribed a higher dose than the quantity limits permit, thus subverting the doctor’s judgment as to the proper dose for an individual patient.

I am faced with the choice of cutting down on the dose, going without entirely, or facing near financial ruin. I am a vibrant elder who as long as I am on the proper dosage can keep active and engaged with my community and family. Many people depend on me. What am I supposed to do?

This is only a synopsis of what I went through. The real story is, so far, 26 pages long. For good or bad I am old enough now to remember back to the mid part of the last century and a skit by a comedian named Jack Benny where a gunman holds him up and demands, “your money or your life.” Benny, a notorious cheapskate, pauses in thought before the impatient hold up man who wants his answer fast. “I’m thinking,” Benny said, “I’m thinking.”

Three years ago I was this comedian, facing this decision of “my money or my life.” Only it was no comedy. The gunman in this scene was what a writer named Timothy Egan, in an article about the senate health reform bill that he wrote for the New York Times on December 23, 2009 , Profiles in Cowardice, called the “Medical-Industrial Complex.”

Though quite healthy then — non-smoker, moderate drinker, no narcotics — I had the excessive misfortune to contract liver disease. I turned as yellow as the lights in this room; I dropped weight like a stone in water, my skin was a hash of claw marks from incessant scratching caused by the toxins that the liver normally filters out circulating back within me because my liver was nearly dead. Many, including my general practitioner, thought I was “a goner.” I am sure that he, and many others, have regretted that this prognosis proved incorrect.

I was insured at the time through my employer with a company headquartered outside of Vermont, United health care. Its CEO made a paltry $13 million that year. Yet, it could have just as easily been in Vermont, with or without catamount. I got an unexpected bill from Catamount last week, for instance, for some routine blood tests. The charges had been applied to “deductible,” throwing the majority of it back to me. It set off the old nightmares again, ptsd syndrome if you will, that still haunt me over having to confront Benny’s dilemma of “my money or my life” — fighting the now familiar litany of hold-up tactics like claim denials (I fought one for nearly a year) that this medical-industrial complex employs to maximize profits and minimize “medical losses.”

One battle, for example, involved an MRI procedure which saved my life. Initially rejected by the insurance company as “medically unnecessary,” it found the golf ball-sized gallstones clogging up my bile ducts, poisoning the liver and back flowing the toxins the liver normally filters out up through me. I had to decide whether to go ahead with this disapproved procedure and risk staggering debt or take on the consequences without it. But the gunman still held more surprises. Three operations and several months later, the yellow came back. This time, however, I had no insurance, such as it had been. My ex-employer had kindly eliminated my job when I returned from sick leave. I had been with them for twelve years. My reward was the pink slip.

Now I really stood before Jack Benny’s gunman. No benefits. No insurance. Two choices: My “money or my life.” I knew what I needed. The hospital’s going rate for it turned out to be $20,000, this for about an hour and a half’s work. Once again, I had to think. I had to put a price sticker on my own life. How much is your life worth? What is the top dollar amount that you would be willing to pay for it? How much debt would you incur on yourself to stay alive? $10,000, $20, $50, $100,000 dollars? In the ultimate perversity, I wound up having to haggle over the price for my own existence, almost like I was negotiating over the price of a new or used vehicle at any one of Vermont’s auto dealerships.

The Vermont legislature has the power to end this crime of a system that constantly forces the sick to confront these decisions. If the political will can somehow be found to render health care a public good for all Vermonters rather than a private commodity for market exchange, there is another famous saying from the last century that will also apply to those with the political courage to do it: “never in the field of human conflict [whether legislation or war] has so much been owed by so many to so few.