Reader comments
Lee Benson: Unlikely lobbyist takes on insurance

Even if someones life is hanging in the balance or their livlihood the insurance giants do not care. They ony care about the bottom line. The opponents of a healthcare system that works have attached a stigmatized word of socialism to a different healthcare system.

That is so you can feel like a socialist if you want to live longer like people in Japan, Canada, Switzwerland or Sweden to name a few. These countries also enjoy lower birth deaths than does the USA.

What does a socialist feel like. do they feel like somone who builds a road for the people. or a school or a hospital. All of these are for our good but we cannot have a healthcare system that works.

I feel really bad this family cannot do what they would like in our free country, but it is not really free when the insurance companies are dictating who they will help and how much they will help.

We are smart enough to build a new system so things like this do not happen on a regular basis.

Situations like this illustrate painfully well why the current insurance system is broken. The free market has no compassion. Insurance companies are making record profits (well, at least until the bottom fell out of the market) while simultaneously offering less and less to their customers. They bilk those who are in good health and either turn away or extort those with any history of health problems.

Kudos to Mrs. Knight for helping people understand why the system has do to change.

One young woman we know was rear ended while driving. She went to a massage therapist for a month but said her neck still was hurting so she was referred to a surgeon. His bill was $40,000 for the two hour surgery...all covered by the other driver's insurance of course.
The rampant greed that is causing health costs to climb at double digit rates year after year can not go unchecked or it will simply bankrupt us all. We have no children left at home but our health coverage is $14,000 per year and the insurance company is gifted at avoiding paying for anything.
Something has to change and fast!

My youngest daughter was born with a severe physical condition that has required repeated hospitalizations, surgeries, therapy, and so on. I work for a big company, and consequently my family has affordable health insurance. (Still too expensive, mind you, but manageable.) I am grateful beyond words for this insurance, but at the same time I know my hands are pretty much tied on the work front -- I could never start my own business, because our past and future health care needs makes us uninsurable as an individual family. I shudder to think what may happen if our daughter's care requirements exceed our current policy's "lifetime maximum benefit" and they drop us.

It really ticks me off when Republicans indiscriminately pull out the "socialized medicine" label to oppose any meaningful reform of the broken, dysfunctional insurance system in this country. I don't care if it's "socialized" or not, I care if people can get the health care they need without going bankrupt.

People in this country are nieve about what Obama is trying to do and that is run our goverment into the ground. Can you imaging goverment run insurance. They couldn't run social security how are they going to run something as important as health care.

I am uninsurable because I have arthritis. I was fortunate enough to be covered by a group health plan until I made a job switch to a small company that offered no health insurance benefits. I thought I could just pick up my own policy but I was wrong. As an individual, even if you can afford to self insure, your chances of actually being able to find an insurance company to cover you is short of impossible if you have any kind of history with something chronic, such as run of the mill osteoarthritis. My option for obtaining health insurance coverage today is through the Health Insurance Pool of Utah, at a very inflated monthly rate, that buys me a major medical policy only. To be honest, if I were to become ill, I couldn't afford to seek treatment because I couldn't come up with my deductible. And if you think my story is not common. Think again. I venture to guess my story looks more like that of the many rather than a select few.