A writer at American Chronicle, Virgil Hervey, offers a personal story about the health-care status quo that Glenn Beck's disciples are working arduously to protect. It begins with Hervey's receiving a call about his parents, who lived in Hollywood and were in a car accident in Italy. Hervey's father died weeks later. His mother was flown back to South Florida in a coma and taken to a hospital in Hollywood that Hervey doesn't name.
His mother soon came out of the coma, leading to a new dilemma for Hervey's family:
[H]ow to tell my mother that my father was dead. She had no recollection of the accident. The last thing she remembered was leaving the wedding of a cousin the day before... The hospital provided her with a psychologist, who advised us that it would be some time before my mother would be able to handle the news. The best thing for the time being, she told us, was to wait for her to ask.But that wasn't the family's decision to make.
Writes Hervey:
[T]he insurance company had informed the hospital that they wanted my mother discharged the next day, that they would no longer pay to keep her in the hospital. My mother still did not know about my father.Hervey, who wasn't in South Florida at the time, broke the news to his mother over the phone. Shortly after his mother was taken home from the hospital, the insurance company called to demand she give back the wheelchair before she could walk.The lesson Hervey learned:
I have concluded that the last thing one needs to go through at a time like that is dealing with a for-profit health insurance company. The alarmists are warning us about government bureaucracy. There was a time that I might have agreed. But after my family´s experience, I am convinced no system could be worse than what we have now.
