Pam Smith

I have led a life of adventure and privilege, having lived in 14 towns and cities in 6 countries on 3 continents and have visited countless other places. It has been a wonderful 58 years, with precious opportunities to see how other cultures approach life and how other governments serve their citizens.

But I had a BIG reality check two years ago, just after my husband, Rick, retired and we were building the home of our dreams in our beloved Rocky Mountains: Rick was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Of course we sought out the best physicians and state-of-the-art treatment – doesn’t everyone want that? Luckily, this treatment stopped the tumor, although too late to save Rick’s sight in his right eye. This is when the nightmare began with our health insurance company, contracted by the company for which Rick had worked for 33 years. Over $180,000 in bills – nearly all the costs related to diagnosing and treating this tumor – were denied by our insurance company. After months of wrangling, Rick reluctantly contacted his company and asked them to intervene. When this did not produce results, he then contacted the CEO of his company, who did intervene and did help solve some of the dispute. But to this day, not all of the bills are paid and my husband still receives threatening mail from the insurance company. This was a wake up call for me. What do people do who do not know someone who will intervene on their behalf? What would we have done if we had had to pay $180,000?

At the same time this was occurring, one of our good, young friends, a mother of two young children, who helped us in our home-building project, had a stroke at age 29. The medical bills and her loss of income would have cost them their home and forced them into bankruptcy without the intervention of friends and family.

These two concurrent health crises made me realize that not only is our health care system broken -- with the insurance companies in the driver’s seat -- but that only one political party in my recent memory has made any sincere effort to address the problem (remember our former first lady, Hillary Clinton?!). Yes, it is a complex problem, as Hillary discovered, but we all know that the first step in solving the problem is having the WILL to solve it. We have all seen recently what a “free market” has done for our economy – indeed the entire world’s economy -- without proper checks and balances. Our health care system is a prime example of an inappropriate application of the free market system, in my opinion. One of government’s core roles is to keep its population safe and healthy. I have switched my party affiliation to Democrat and I am voting for Barack Obama because I believe he understands the impact on ordinary citizens our dysfunctional health care system has had and he has the motivation, leadership and intelligence to try to do something about it.