Honey, I want you to see the face of someone being tortured by her health insurance company.  Here's a clip of a woman whose husband has a traumatic brain injury begging Senator Tom Coburn for help at a town hall meeting several months ago.  I've never met this woman, but I feel like I know everything about her life after spending so much time with survivors of traumatic brain injuries and their families.  I can tell you her back story without needing to hear it from her.

The woman in the video clip, like so many women I've met, lost the husband she'd always known to traumatic brain injury.  After his horrible injury, he spent weeks if not months in a coma in the hospital.  He needed a ventilator to breathe.  He developed contractures in his hands, arms, legs and feet from lying so still in his hospital bed for so long.  Despite still being unconscious, he began depleting his private insurance policy's inpatient rehabilitation benefits when his physical therapist started passively stretching his muscles to prevent his contractures from twisting his body into an inflexible knot.  After weeks or months, he began to slowly emerge from his coma.

He continued to drain his rehabilitation benefits as he slowly improved and was weaned off his ventilator.  It took weeks for him to learn how to sit in a chair again.  It took weeks for him to build up enough strength and control to transfer from bed to chair to walker.  He continued to burn through his rehab benefits as he tried to learn how to stand and take a few steps with heavy assistance from his therapists.  Perhaps he also had severe cognitive deficits and didn't understand what was being asked of him and why, making his progress more difficult.  He had to learn how to speak again.  He might have had vision, hearing, and/or balance problems to further complicate matters.  And since he had lost his ability to swallow without aspirating food and water into his lungs, he remained on a feeding tube.  Finally, after months of fighting to restore as much function, independence and quality of life as possible, he exhausted his rehabilitation benefits.  His private insurance company refused to pay for one more cent of rehabilitation regardless of his potential to improve, and he was sent home from the skilled nursing center as-is to be cared for by his wife.

The woman in the video clip didn't look particularly young or robust.  I wonder if her husband can bathe and toilet himself without help, or if this woman is breaking her back all day long supporting him whenever he needs to be moved from his bed.  I wonder if he even knows who she is.  I do know that her private insurance company has refused to pay for rehabilitation to help him learn to swallow his food again, so she has to pump liquid nutrition into his feeding tube several times a day to keep her husband from starving to death or becoming dehydrated.  Since her husband needs her there all day every day to care for him, she obviously can't work--I wonder how she pays her bills, and if she is in danger of losing her home.

Listen to the grief and desperation in her voice as she asks Senator Coburn for help.  Senator Coburn seems to think that the solution to her problems is for her neighbors to all pitch in and help her.  Honey, I don't care how many neighbors volunteer to mow her yard, bring her a casserole, clean her house or do her grocery shopping, her neighbors can't wean her husband off his feeding tube and help him reach his full recovery potential.

Lots of folks made a fuss over government death panels during the health care debate.  Honey, I hate to break it to you, but your private health insurance policy was intentionally written to be a death panel--in the case of the woman at the town hall, a "living death" panel.  They rationed her husband's care and then dropped him and left him to rot, and don't kid yourself--they wouldn't have thought twice about doing the same to you.  So, honey, if you were pitching a fit about death panels and rationing care during the health care debate, I hope you'll re-evaluate your opposition to the the health care bill.  I can't imagine how you could possibly side with the private health insurers who'd sooner see you roasting in hell than let you get your grubby paws on their billions in profits.  Supporting a predatory private health insurance system doesn't makes you a "capitalist," honey, it makes you a fool.

I'm glad the health care bill is now law, and there might be some relief in sight for the woman in the video clip and her husband.  I hope you'll get acquainted with the new law, and do everything you can to help improve on it for all our sakes.  I know I will, honey.