Why aren't we fixing health insurance?

Where can I get health insurance for $112 per month?

That’s one of the most common questions that popped up recently on a Daily American Republic social media post about figures released by an online bill payment service called doxo.

I shared their report, and a link to the report, to see what people who live here thought.

The national company said $112 was the average monthly health insurance cost for someone living in Poplar Bluff.

One of the people who commented said, “More like 4x that amount.”

I would agree, and add more if you were looking for family insurance or a premium policy.

Doxo says their information is drawn from the individuals who use their service. The company said it was collected from a customer base of 10 million people, paying bills to more than 120,000 providers across 97% of the U.S. zip codes.

So their data doesn’t necessarily represent Poplar Bluff, since they don’t share how many customers they are serving in our town, or any of the demographics regarding those people.

I can share that my sister recently changed jobs. Her son just turned 5 and has serious asthma. He was hospitalized four times last year for it, twice in the ICU. He has, at times, used two different inhalers that were taken multiple times a day, and cost as much as $400 a month without health insurance.

My sister was told by a carrier as she was changing plans that if her son was without coverage for more than 60 days, it would take a year before a new plan would cover his pre-existing asthma. She was also told it would take about that long to be eligible for her new employer’s health coverage.

She was offered a gap policy at $1,300 for one month to keep him covered between plans.

During this time, we tried other resources like HealthCare.gov to shop around for plans. It turns out that HealthCare.gov requires children to apply for Missouri Medicare before you can find a policy on the marketplace for them.

The problem with this is that it takes 45 days for the Medicare application to process.

During that time, my nephew’s first application was lost. Then it was accidentally closed.

Then my sister received a letter in the mail saying it was refused because she failed to provide requested additional information. Except no one had contacted her by mail, email, phone or carrier pigeon (as far as we can tell) to ask for more details.

During this process she called the state Medicare number twice, was on hold for two and a half and three and a half hours respectively, trying to move things along.

The third time she set an appointment to go into the local office and speak with someone in person... But not actually.

She was put in a room and connected via phone to a worker... whose computer wasn’t working and had to call her back several hours later.

After all of that, she was able to get a much, much cheaper health insurance plan than the gap policy.

How much it will actually cover of my nephew’s future medical needs and what twists and turns that will take, who knows.

As we all know, our health care system is badly broken. Why aren’t we doing more about that? This is a major election year, but I’ve yet to hear much talk about this issue, which impacts every single man, woman and child in our country.

Donna Farley is editor of the Daily American Republic. She can be reached at dfarley@darnews.com.