The American Public on Health Care-The Missing Perspective - (Page 9)

A mother who owns a small business in Miami discovers that her four year-old son has reached his lifetime cap for insurance coverage one month after being released from a hospital. “You don’t always look at every single one of those details because you don’t expect a crisis, a trauma… you don’t know that you’re going to cap out in a month.” A retired woman describes her “problem with portability.” Her family has moved, but “if I want to move, I will not be able to. I can’t take my insurance to another state.” A student at the University of Miami worries about the cost of health care, not for himself, but for his grandparents who cannot afford the co-payments or their medication. A man in San Francisco who was born and raised in Ireland says, “I never thought of not having health care because I grew up in a country that has universal health care run by the government. It is not perfect, but my mom and dad (78 and 82 years old) never, ever worry… my dad just had an infection in his foot, was in the hospital and never worried about it.” A mentally ill young woman in Detroit died, according to her mother, because “she was receiving so much fragmented care in the system… she didn’t see one psychiatrist on a regular basis… she was hospitalized in many facilities… she didn’t get the care she needed… for five or six years. It was tragic for our family—we were unable to get her the care she needed.” 9

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