American insurance companies are the villains

Today, I got a notice in the mail from my insurance company, and it set off a flurry of thoughts I struggled to articulate through the meltdown that ensued.

I was told three times that I’d been approved to continue seeing my trauma specialist that my insurance company decided to drop a few months ago. Fast-forward through long phone conversations, confusion among all parties, and emotional exhaustion. Today, I got the letter they’d told me would be the approval. I opened it. It was a denial. I shut down emotionally, and the volcano within me bubbled that had been at the brink of bursting after more bad news earlier in the week.

My food stamps are being massively lowered when I’d already been struggling. My emotional support companions’ needs aren’t expensive enough to lower my rent, and my rent is going up a little next year. I recently stopped HRT (testosterone) because it may have been causing some health issues, and with my body reverting back, it’s been a challenge mentally. Now, I’m losing my trauma specialist when she’d just told me I was finally ready to recover. I’d spent years relapsing with self-harm and progress, enduring therapy, surviving, and coming back to therapy and doing the work, only to finally see the finish line and have the rug ripped out from under me.

In my therapist’s letter to my insurance company, she’d written at the time that I was actively suicidal during my last appointment before I was cut off, and the work we were doing was extremely important for my recovery from CPTSD. I had developed a trusting relationship with my therapist, and it would be detrimental to my well-being to cut me off now and attempt to start over with someone new. It would delay my recovery when it was right there.

My insurance company consulted a doctor I’d never met, who knows nothing about me. That doctor wrote in their denial that there was no evidence I was a danger to myself, and they will not allow me to continue with someone out of network. Someone they had covered for the past year that they decided they didn’t want to reach a deal with.

Because of United Healthcare’s decision — because of their choices — I lost crucial CPTSD therapy. They disrupted my progress and are wanting me to start over with someone else they may decide to drop at a moment’s notice eventually, too. They want me to say goodbye to a therapist who is a trans ally, who I felt safe with. These people have no idea what it’s like — the anxiety involved — to search for a new therapist that is, hopefully, in network that is also trans-inclusive and who I work well with. That narrows things down to a point where I may struggle to find anyone else.

Through all of this, I’m expected to stay calm and cope. I can’t melt down, I can’t get online and vent for fear people will just ignore me or be annoyed because I’m being too negative. For the fear that I’m being a burden or being too negative and I’ll fade further into the void when I’m trying to get somewhere as a creator.

I have to be palatable. I have to suffer in private, or vent to friends who also have their own problems. I have to worry about putting on a mask publicly so my mental illnesses don’t take the wheel and cause me to make another mistake; to again be affected by symptoms of CPTSD that make me as touchy as an open, festering wound when I've tried to bottle up feelings for so long that I’m once again coming off as too negative.

And I still have fighting to do. I have to beg my therapist to appeal the denial and hope she takes the grating amount of time to get through to the doctor that made the decision. I have to hope that the waiting list I got on elsewhere has a therapist that is trans-friendly and they’ll be a safe option that my insurance won’t drop once I start to reach my goal again. And there will always be that fear hovering over me now, the fear that no matter where I go, United Healthcare can just rip it away from me without advanced notice.

The years of survival and constantly fighting to get help are weighting heavier on me than ever. And it’s painfully ironic; a lot of people with certain hard-to-treat mental illnesses, including some of the ones I have, have a track record of not seeking out help or sticking with it. I’ve been adamant in getting better for as long as I’ve suffered, since I was ten years old sitting in a psych ward in the Children’s Hospital with the desire to die because I was being bullied so badly at home and at school.

If someone like me, who has fought tooth and nail to get better and pursue help, is struggling to keep access, how many people have just given up when they lost it the first time? So many it’s tragic. And many won’t even fight with insurance companies for coverage, nor do many have the energy or the ability to know how to fight when it’s so convoluted. Many are turned away because of the cost. Many who don’t have insurance are barred altogether from getting help.

I’m just one voice of many, many others, but I am disgusted with the American healthcare system. Insurance companies make medical decisions for people they’ve never met, and they’re more concerned with saving as much money as possible rather than making sure someone doesn’t literally die or suffer. It’s cold, it’s heartless, it’s fucking capitalism.

When you live in a country where a bag of saline only costs a few bucks to make, and a hospital will charge someone in the emergency room hundreds of dollars for it, there isn’t a lot of hope. Insurance companies control people’s access to medical help, and yes, they do practice medicine illegally. You don’t know who the ‘doctors’ are they consult. It’s just so they can legally protect themselves when they make important medical decisions for a patient they’ve never even seen.

Insurance companies in America are in control of who lives and who dies. They are run by rich people who only care about saving as much money as possible by denial of services so they can get another yacht or private jet; they are the ones who get to choose. One more coffin equals one more payment towards a luxury cruise.

We are already living in an existential dystopian nightmare in America. And the rich make the less fortunate turn on themselves by spreading propaganda about the mentally ill, those who suffer from addiction, the disabled, and the poor. The rich laugh at us when we fight with each other, when the middle class blames the poor for ‘taking their tax money’ to buy food and access healthcare.

Meanwhile, the ultra-rich are getting richer and bleeding the middle class and the poor dry while they watch us scatter about like ants; while they decide who lives, who dies, and who suffers.