ALERT: Limbaugh And Media Desperados Lack Focus

It started with a man buying her a drink in a Fort Lauderdale bar. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine. When she lost her medical insurance soon after for reasons not related to to the rape incident and tried to get insurance elsewhere, she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Christina Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

Many stories have come to light like this one because medical insurance companies are becoming more desperate and bold with their denial of claims to stay one step ahead of the recession and Barack Obama’s new health reform agenda. Women are coming out of the woodwork crying foul that they too have been denied coverage. They say they were deemed ineligible for health insurance because they had a pre-existing condition as a result of a rape, such as post traumatic stress disorder or a sexually transmitted disease. Other patients and therapists wrote in with allegations that insurers are routinely denying long-term mental health care to women who have been sexually assaulted.

Having worked with rape victims, and having personally witnessed loved ones who were the survivors of rape, I can tell you this is a very sore subject for me.

Susan Pisano, spokeswoman for the health insurance industry's largest trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, said insurers do not discriminate against victims of sexual assault and ordinarily would not even know if a patient had been raped. However, her words are just proving untrue with the hard evidence accumalating against insurance companies.

Turner's story about HIV drugs is not unusual. Yet some doctors and nurses conterattack with stating that the industry's policy is not medically sound. The chance of a rape victim actually contracting AIDS is very low. It doesn't make any sense to use that as a calculus for determining who gets health insurance, they claim.

Nurses who deal with sexual assault cases say the industry's policy creates a significant problem for those treating women who have been assaulted. Women are already leery enough to report the rape, go through the legal process of getting justice, and going through necessary medical care for the rape. Now, they have more to worry about and less incentive to report the rape with the knowledge that medical insurance companies will deny them coverage indeffinately. What are we supposed to tell women now? Well, I guess you have a choice - you can risk your health insurance or you can risk AIDS. Go ahead and choose.

Many are avoiding the hassle and going to places like Planned Parenthood to get exams and pay out of pocket for the care. If they are lucky to have medical insurance when the rape occurred, then the insurance companies violates them a second time-this time for not covering necessary treatments because there are arguments between insurance companies and doctors about what is medically necessary for the treatment of rape, PTSD, STDs, and so forth. Some therapists and patients said the managed care companies have cut off necessary treatment for sexual assault victims in the name of cost containment.

This is what I recommend: if you report the rape, get your local Rape Crisis Center in on the case immediately. If further treatment is needed after the rape exam, try to cross state lines and go to a clinic there. Ask the doctor for copies of the treatment records for your attorney. The purpose: Keep any and all records off MIB databases. Have your HIV testing done on community clinic days, pay cash, and use false names and SSN's.If someone claims fraud later on, plead self-defense and file a civil rights lawsuit.

And, I don’t think the Public Option reform plan is going to scare these greedy insurance companies one bit. They will adapt and make a new avenue in which to victimize Americans further.

Where do you draw the line if a rape is considered a “pre-existing condition”? What can possible be done about a situation that you had no fault in and didn’t plan on happening?

Having insurance and preventative or pro-active medical care decreases health problems,costs, and risks. People are apt to go to the doctor right away when a medical problem arises, like a lump in the breast, and get tests done. Then, they get treatment that is a huge fraction of what it would have cost if they had waited. The patient may have died if not for the necessary early treatment!

Make no mistake about it - the health care debate is about whether you live or die. I’ve said it many articles in the past. I don’t care if Limbaugh doesn’t know fact or fiction, satire or truth.I don’t care if he never read Obama’s college thesis or not.I couldn’t care less what people in the media say about Republicans, because the shoe doesn’t fit, so to speak, and I am not the kind of Republican they paint me out to be. Let those nutjobs humiliate themselves on the air, for all I care! I want someone to run the White House with serious brevity on the real issues at hand, without campaigning for the Olympic spot; without being a Letterman guest and media whoremonger; and without distracting Fox news minute-by-minute slander and counterattacks. Those things don’t matter to me much. I want to know my kids can go to school without a suicide bomb blowing up on them;without them being denied medical coverage/care; without their basic needs like food, water, and shelter, not costing so much we must ration it;without security and law prevailing fairly in our nation; and corruption and dictatorship not becoming the norm. Why does it seem, and this is my opinion that I derived on my own, that no one running this country have any focus on real issues? It’s like they have a severe case of ADHD! Do we really give a rats ass what Michelle Obama wore Saturday night or what she wears when using a hoolahoop?

I know when I am scraping human scum off the streets, while media readers are fast asleep in their little beds dreaming of their clueless lives, I am not terribly concerned if a fatass named Limbaugh read a blog and took it as truth and regurgitated it all over the media. I don’t care if Obama wrote about nuclear power in college. I certainly don’t give a damn about an idiot Iranian president denying the Holcaust, because that’s just plain stupid, wreckless, and ignorant. There’s way too much evidence it occurred, so the idiot needs to pick up a book instead of a bomb and learn something.

Am I the only one that feels this way? Read another article about Limbaugh if you don’t. You’re wasting your time if you do. He’s another desperate, deprived, lonely person hungry for approval like Balloon Boy’s family. I would rather spend my time trying to figure out how to change a person’s life for the better!