We were lucky

That seems to be an understatement right now.  When I got home yesterday, my dad was watching one of his news shows and there was a segment on the new health care from the Obama administration.  Before I make a total judgement about the effectiveness of the program, I will definitely have to do more research than watching one little news segment.  But it did make me remember that we were the lucky ones.  That might sound selfish and weird considering what my family lost, but in the grand scheme of things (the ones I can change) we were lucky.

Here's a short summary of the news piece...Under the new "Obamacare", several insurance companies will make changes.  One of those areas of change will be in how payments are made for specialized care (read...cancer into that).  Many patients will be responsible for the charges of "specialized" care and treatments.

Here's why I feel lucky...We had the insurance company that TRS uses since we are in education.  Our deductible is $500 with up to $2,000 out of pocket (so for all you math people that's $2,500 per insurance year).  Keeping healthy that seems like a lot of money, until you need it.  I can't tell you the number of times a nurse would come in when Jason needed medicine and they had to go check to make sure the medicine was covered by insurance and they'd say, "Gee, you have REALLY good insurance.  This is covered, and it's not by some providers."  Many of his treatments (including the somewhat "experimental" ones, because his type of leukemia was not common in his age group) were covered by the insurance company. 

The insurance year ends August 31st of each year.  We begin again on September 1st.  During his four years of treatments we often times paid our $2,500 by the end of October, and the rest of the year was covered by insurance.  After Jason passed away, but before I went back to work, I was curious.  I figured that over the course of his four year battle we ended up paying $10,000.  Now before you say, "Dang!  That's a lot of money!"  Yes, it is.  But I added up the cost of his treatments each year and over the course of his four years of treatment his total cost was well over $1 million dollars.  That's right...a 1 with six zeros after it.  Now that, is a lot of money.  And it's money we definitely didn't have. 

If Jason had cancer during "Obamacare" his battle wouldn't have been very long, but worst of all, his daughter wouldn't have remembered her dad.

That's why I feel lucky.