On the recordMarch 22, 2010
As I travel throughout my district in North Carolina, many people tell me that they have health insurance but it's not worth the paper that it's written on. They are counted as insured; but in reality, they are uninsured. For example, a gentleman in my district told me that he has had insurance for more than 10 years on the job and he pays $200 a month out of his paycheck, but he's never used it. And when I asked him why he hadn't used it, he said because the deductible is $5,000 per year and as far as he was concerned, he is uninsured. I went into another part of my district and went to a dialysis center, and a young man there told me that he had been insured by a very reputable insurance company and that he needed a kidney transplant and his sister donated a kidney to him. And it was a successful transplant and it worked very well. But after 2 years, his insurance company stopped paying for the anti-rejection medication that he needs for his kidney. And he lost the kidney, and now he is back on dialysis and the government is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to sustain him.
