Congress working on new long term disability bill
Congress is working on a new bill to give long term care to everyone that works. The bill allows those that have been injured to have nurses come into the home. As it stands now, critically injured people are sent home from the hospital with no medical care coverage. For the next 18 months the injured have to hope that they will not require expensive hospitalization. After 18 months Medicare finally kicks in but there are other issues that can easily throw a family out in the streets. Those that are permanently unable to work are put on Social Security Disability Insurance, but that typically only pays out enough live on a month to month basis. If there are expensive prescriptions that are required there is a serious problem called the donut hole. This hole means that if you and your Medicare provider pay out more than $2700, then coverage stops until you personally pay out $4100 in cash. Since virtually everyone on SSDI cannot pay that kind of money, they stop taking their medication until next January when everything kicks back in. More work needs to be done, but this new bill will at least cover people from catastrophic injuries throwing them into the streets because they cannot pay their bills anymore. (Source: McKnights)
This is the time for all of us to contact our congressmen and senators. After many false starts and promises, this is the first time in many years that real changes in Medicare and Medicaid can be made., However, unless we let congress know what we need and why, we can expect things to be just as screwed up as it is now. We must have coverage that can pay the existing bills and gives us reasonable access to hospitals and prescription drugs. It is unreasonable to think that someone that cannot work can somehow come up with large sums of money to pay for their health care. If SSDI pays $2000 a month and your bills are $1800 a month, how can you pay an additional $900 in prescription drugs that month? Medicare and Catastrophic Care must be fit together so that when one runs out he other immediately picks up without the donut hole.
In general you should always be in touch with your folks in congress. They make a lot of money and are paid to listen to you, to voter. Every issue that they vote on costs us money and civil rights. Democracy is not a spectator sport, it demands that we all get involved. It is sad when we get less than 50% of voters actually coming in to vote. Why would you let someone else make your decisions for you? Let yourself be known so we can have the type of government and country that we want. The more we get involved the better chance that we can get the changes we need and the people in place to protect us when emergencies arise.
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