I was also recently turned down by my current insurance company for several tests my doctor thinks I need. They are too expensive for me to pay for on my own.

We pay off ER bills at the rate of $10 or $50 a month, knowing it will be years before we’re paid off for whatever epic injury (broken bones, food poisoning that lasted 48 hours of vomiting, flu viruses run amok) occurred.

I remember my mother’s often-hours-long conversations with insurance companies when I was small, when health care was taken for granted. The insurance comapny didn’t seem to want to cover anything, ever.

I was shocked when I started receiving $400 bills for lab work whenever I had a routine exam. The insurance company just didn’t cover that, not one cent. At that time $400 was well-over a month’s rent and utilities; I cried for weeks.

I see my grandparents scraping together every last penny for their health care, which grows increasingly complex with their age and failing health. Hearts just don’t work that long, and the crutches to prop them up are increasingly expensive.

As for myself, I was honoured to have a medical practitioner who actually encouraged me to any means possible to prop up my immune system. He had just had biopsied exceedingly irregular cells and was willing to warn me that with good care, I could escape from further and worse damage.

This is ugly, and it could only get worse before it ever gets better.

Frankly, as a woman who has some murky genetic disorders looming in my future, I am flat-out scared of individualized health care. When I say, “I will move to Canada if McCain is elected,” I am not threatening this out of some petulant need to diss America – I am seriously looking for a way to grow old without going bankrupt by medical bills (which, again, is not a baseless fear – my parents went bankrupt over medical bills).