I have a weird cyst-like thing on my boob. I'm 90% sure it's nothing, but it never hurts to be sure. So I went to Planned Parenthood, where, thanks to the failed efforts to defund the organization, I was able to get a breast exam for practically nothing. The NP told me what I thought, that she's 90% sure it was nothing. But to be safe, maybe we should think about referring me to a specialist.
Now, here I had two choices: trust the NP's 90% judgment, or go ahead with the referral. What could be the harm, anyway? So I had PP schedule my appointment with a local specialist for imaging.
Unfortunately, the specialists didn't get rich by offering the low-cost health care that Planned Parenthood offers. Not having insurance that pays for PREVENTATIVE care, the specialist appointment will run me over $300. THREE HUNDRED.
Now, my insurance would cover me if I waited for whatever this thing is to grow and spread and threaten my life, assuming it is something we should be worried about. They would gladly front the thousands of dollars in cancer treatment in the rare case that that's what this cyst-like thingy is. But no, we can't have them just tossing checks at early diagnostic or preventative treatment. Not for the pithy $100 I send them every month.
That's the problem here. I have $100 to spend on health insurance each month. That gives me the chance to be covered if I get hit by a truck or if my life is in danger due to some awful disease that I likely wouldn't recover from anyway. To actually prevent the need for thousands of dollars in health care costs, however, I have to pay the $300 out of pocket.
Sound familiar? The government's Medicaid program is similar. It is completely willing to pay (minimal) prenatal and delivery costs for pregnant folks, but ask Medicaid for $300 for an abortion (or a fraction of the cost for a midwife-assisted home birth), and you get jack shit. They'd rather pay thousands than hundreds, mostly because they know that a person who REALLY needs to come up with the fee will come up with it, even if it means they can't pay for groceries for the next few weeks.
It comes down to ideology, be it capitalist or antichoice, or a mix of both. Either way, I'm paying that $300 to have my boob looked at, or I'm not and it's nothing anyway so my insurance company doesn't have to pay anyone anything anyhow. Just like a pregnant person will either find that $300 for an abortion, or she'll use Medicaid for minimal prenatal and pediatric care and the government can continue using statistics about poor women being a drain on society. Because she had no other choice. Because no one gave her another choice.
Thing is, I have way more resources than the pregnant person living in public housing with her two kids finding herself pregnant again and unable to pay for groceries. There's no comparison once you scratch the surface; I can get that $300 way more easily than she can. My parents, for example. Or savings. But it doesn't change the fact that we both could have benefited from the public option that the Democrats abandoned like frightened kittens all because some misled jackass in a Paul Revere costume sat in a lawn chair and held up a sign.
Whatever this thing is, it's nothing. I know that. But it doesn't pay to take risks. The use of growth hormones in our food has given us pre-menopausal breast cancer rates like we've never seen before. I need to be careful. I need to be smart. I need to have it looked at. It's just too bad that being careful and smart is a privilege reserved for those of us with the financial resources to buy it. And we can just keep believing that the many women who let those mysterious lumps go unattended are just a "drain" on a society that drained them first.
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