It is true that the government does not actually provide the healthcare in that kind of system, but provides payment for services. However, this also means the Medicaid system will refuse certain tests and treatments, including certain medicines, if their system says it’s too costly. That’s what happened to me. Because of Medicaid refusing to allow doctors to do tests based on the cost, it took years for some minor (yet potentially serious) health problems to be diagnosed. By the time they were diagnosed, they were already very serious and had spawned other health problems as complications. Because the system does not work like an emergency room triage… you do not get treatment sooner if your case is worse, you wait your turn in line… getting treatment took even longer and allowed these problems to grow. And that’s after my doctor spent months jumping through Medicaid’s hoops to prove that the treatments were necessary.

A condition that could have been diagnosed and treated in the early stages, and at least managed if not completely corrected, instead had the chance to become a much more severe illness, create two other chronic conditions as complications, leave me infertile and with a higher chance of having endometrial cancer in the future, and resulted in an uncommon nuerological disease that mimics a brain tumor and could have caused me to lose my sight. I did lose quite a bit of my peripheral vision and color vision, but the damage was (thankfully!) not permanent. I should have been treated within a month of diagnosis because the disease is that dangerous and debilitating. Because I was a Medicaid patient, treatment waited eight months. And remember, that’s on top of the fact that I didn’t have to develop this disease if Medicaid had not prevented diagnosis and treatment in the past to save money.

The healthcare insurance system is definitely flawed, and people are paying the price with their lives. But the government has done nothing with Medicaid and Medicare, or with the VA care for our veterans, that makes me believe they can fix it. What happened to me is so horrible the fear of going through it again almost makes me think it would be better just to die if the disease becomes active again (which it could). And I am not an isolated case when it comes to the health failures of a government-funded system. It terrifies me to think of that being able to happen to millions more people than it is already happening to, and especially knowing that people would actually ask for this because they don’t know the truth about how it works and think it would make them safer.