Got a healthcare story to tell?

aren't about me. They're about friends.

One is a friend who is dying. The healthcare system is helping her stay alive, for now, even as it pummels her with a shitstorm of paperwork, sky-high bills, hoops to jump and worse. And she has insurance.

Another is a friend, an odd-jobs carpenter, who lives with a woman and her two children. She is suffering from arsenic poisoning and needs a hip replacement. No insurance. He has been waiting for care at the UNC Dental School for almost a year now, and suffers from chronic pain. He bought a filling for one tooth at Walmart. No insurance either.

He gets hurt on the job and they are totally screwed. Totally.

A friend of mine recently had open heart surgery (4 bypasses, actually) late last year. He has BCBSNC as his health insurance company and is self-employed (he owns a plant nursery). Today, 2/25, he got his bill from the hospital where he has been taking physical therapy (treadmill stuff, monitoring etc). Previous to Jan. 1, his insurance covered the vast majority of the cost of his physical therapy. However, the bill today called for him to pay the entire amount.

So, he called his BCBSNC representative because...surely there was some kind of mistake. The representative told him that because the deductable on his policy goes from calendar year to calendar year, he had to meet his deductable for 2010 before his insurance would once again pay for his physical therapy. He told the representative that the therapy was "ongoing" and started at the end of 2009. She told him that did not matter and that he had to once again meet the deductable.

Being like me (a smart-ass :), he asked the woman what would happen if at 10:00pm Dec. 31st 2009 he was in the middle of heart surgery and it lasted unto 2am, Jan. 1st 2010. "Would I be charged part of the cost for the two hours into 2010?".

He has a point, don't ya think?

There were a lot of health care related stories told today for anyone who had a chance to watch it. Here are some of the highlights. I think Congresswoman Slaughter was dead on when she talked about the unfairness of domestic abuse as a preexisting condition, and it reminds me of just how much I want to see Senator Burr (who voted in favor of continuing that abhorrent practice) kicked out of office this November.

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If you watch the first two minutes of this, you'll see the GOP plan, in full. Well worth the watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I have told my story so many times, I just do not have the spirit to rehash it all. So forgive me for posting a summary:

Family history of mental issues
Worked at factory for 10 years
Had great health care through factory and managed condition
Factory closed, insurance lost
Condition worsened severely
Developed severe agoraphobia
Did not leave home for three years
Got disability plus Medicare
Got meds and doctor visits with co-pay
Still not 100% but:
was able to do things from home, especially get a B.S degree and work for some political campaigns

Had I been able to receive continuous medical care, who knows what I could have accomplished. But I will sit here, a quarter through a Master's degree and virtually unemployable.

Welcome to the current health care system. Live from the trailer park in Millers Creek. Ho Ho Ho.

We have to keep telling stories of our broken health care system to remind everyone why change is necessary.

And if you have a specific story to share you can email me at adam.linker@ncjustice.org. We are producing video stories and sharing with the press.

We're a family of three and buy BCBS individual policy as it is about 1/3 the cost of other options we have. Premiums keep going up, but still by far the cheapest option. Had six-figure total claim a while back and they paid without a peep.

That said, it is crazy that I save money by not participating in my employer-based plan. Crazier still because I own my own business. Health insurance is my number one cost after labor. If I did not have health insurance as a benefit, I am pretty sure none of my non-medicare-eligible employees could afford to buy insurance on the open market. Frankly, business is so slow I can't afford to provide insurance as a benefit, but even beyond the moral obligation to help them out, I would probably lose a good number of them if I dropped coverage. I'm stuck in the health insurance death spiral.

1 year of cancer treatments then 4 years of trying to over come the side effects of Chemo.

Let's talk deductibles, they are not a one time event. They apply to each new Dr. you see, new treatments, new medications. My $2,500.00 dollar deductible was met with one Pet-scan, however but my anti-nausea pills cost $250.00 each so I had to pay out of pocket until I reached the deductible for that specific medication.

My $2,500.00 deductible became $40,000.00 a year out of pocket expenses, after paying the $14,000.00 annual premium.

Until you been in the belly of the health care beast you cannot imagine all the ways the insurance companies screw you. And like most patients I spent a considerable amount of time fighting with the insurance companies over the billings.

Forcing people, who are fighting for their lives, to fight for coverage they paid for is the norm, not the exception.

When I moved to NC last year BCBS would not cover me due to my preexisting condition of having been free of cancer for 5 years. My BC insurance premiums, from California, actually went down on the 5 year anniversary, which is considered as a full recovery from cancer. In my case I actually had a curable form of cancer so I'm in a very low risk category.

Today I'm a very healthy 56 year old male, but BCBS of NC wants to push me into the High Risk insurance policies, where people are dying of their diseases.

The High Risk group premiums are beyond anything most people could ever afford.

The actions of BCBS of NC are capricious. They are not based on facts but rather profit margins. They are not in the business of helping customers rather they are a profit driven company that allows their customers to suffer and die.

These insurance executives are psychopaths, they are the biggest serial murders in the country and should be treated as the criminals they are.