Health Insurance

One of the things that Europeans don't understand is that most Americans are just one major illness away from bankruptcy.  You can work your entire life and end up losing everything due to crushing medical bills.  

If you lose your job then you lose your health coverage.  If you don't have a job, which offers health insurance, then you don't have benefits which means you don't go to the doctor because you can't afford it.  It's a horrible system.

One of the best things that the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, did was prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on a pre-existing condition.  Here's how it used to work until recently...

Let's say you work for a company and while there you get cancer.  Even if you beat the cancer then you now have a pre-existing condition.  This means that you basically become stuck working for your company.  You can't really take a job anywhere else because when it's time to get health insurance with your new company, the insurance company can deny you coverage because of the preexisting condition.  Basically you became an indentured servant because you couldn't change up your employment.  It's not just cancer, it applies to everything...diabetes, HIV, asthma, cataracts, high blood pressure, heart disease, pregnancy.

It's absolutely unforgivable that Republican politicians want to get rid of the ACA.  If that happens, then the pre-existing condition problem will return.  How many Americans could be denied health coverage once COVID-19 becomes a preexisting condition?

Here are the number of people who have lost their health coverage over the past two weeks due to losing their job.

Czech Republic - 0

Austria - 0

Belgium - 0

Denmark - 0

Finland - 0

France - 0

Germany - 0

Greece - 0

Hungary - 0

Iceland - 0

Ireland - 0

Italy - 0

Netherlands - 0

Norway - 0

Portugal - 0

Slovakia - 0

Spain - 0

Sweden - 0

Switzerland - 0

United Kingdom - 0

United States - 3,500,000