A Twist of Things to Come

I've been struggling with website code, trying to publish an article that is very important to me. The subject of the piece is frustrating enough by itself. See, it's all about how my friend hominysnark needs a hysterectomy to keep an unpleasant medical condition from becoming a life-threatening one (it's already most of the way there) and she can't, because she doesn't have health insurance.

Why doesn't she have health insurance? Because she's self-employed, and as many self-employed creative people (she's an artist and writer - full disclosure, she writes for GC) know all too well, when you have to choose between eating and having a place to sleep or having health insurance, the health insurance loses. I know this, because the hubby and I have been paying for self-employment health benefits for most of this decade, watching the cost go higher and higher while the benefits get lower and lower. We pay more for health insurance than we do for shelter, but live in terror of not having it, just in case. Because not having it could mean complete financial ruin, and destroy our children's future. It's freaking scary.

So, anyway. She needs $2700.00 for the operation, or she has to wait for her condition to become life-threatening. (It will get there long before she could save up that much, especially since she has $8,000.00 in medical bills from just having it diagnosed.) See, she falls in that sweet spot between having enough income to have health insurance or pay for health care herself and being poor enough to qualify for any sort of break from providers or government program.

And that BLOWS. As Homer Simpson put it FIFTEEN YEARS ago:




It really singes my biscuits that someone talented and witty and goddammed BRAVE enough to make her way in the world by her own brain and hands, on her own, has to risk her life and livelihood to medical care that most people in the first world can get without those conditions. It's barbaric. The US is now ranked 37th in health care, well behind most of the first world. That ranking table was done in 2000, I know, and I'm not about to argue whether things have gotten a lot better when it comes to basic care since then.

But my issue here is not the system (or not JUST the system). My issue is that I don't want my friend to bleed to death or suffer organ failure from anemia, when a relatively simple procedure would fix her AND cost the health care system less than helping her after it's gotten bad enough that they can't turn her away.

So, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to post about it everywhere I can, and beg people to donate a buck or two. (The GC article will be up as soon as I can get the son of a mother duckling DONATE button code to work with my craptacular site software.)

I'm going to go around the internet to any place I can think of, making a complete spectacle of myself because hominysnark's health is more important than my own squeamishness about begging people for money.

And I'm not going to apologize for that, because I know that if every one who can will give a buck or two, maybe we can get this thing done before her life is at risk. Here's a button for her Bye-Bye Woman-Part that is Killing Me Fund (Also called "The Human Fund"):

I know a lot of you know her and would like to help, but even if you don't know her, please post and link and do whatever you can to spread the word. Ask your friends to spread the word. If all of us who can spare a buck or two give a little bit, it can help.