I'm going to use my experiences with a dental situation as a real life example of how it is to visit a dentist when you have insurance,lose all coverage and then what it's like going to a dentist on medical assistance.

If you need a dentist to pull a tooth ,and there are none that accept medicaid, in your county, You cannot get a tooth pulled.

If you get disability SSI and medical assistance, and you must pay out of pocket for a dentist,because recently medical assistance has drastically cut services, you are screwed because all the dentists in my area want cash UP FRONT before they even LOOK in your mouth. If you know the tooth is infected and can no longer be put off..Then a decision must be made. To either get an infected tooth pulled out and pay out of pocket or go two weeks without food or pay double on some bills and take 6 months to play catch up. Take days on the phone to seek out the cheapest dentist. In my area dentists who charge around $300.00 are the cheapest ones..

That fee is roughly half of my income.

I have healthy teeth,I brush 4 times a day,I do my own plaque scaling,and I have a professional water pik I got on sale for 15 bucks. But still can teeth get injured.


Here's my dentist story.

When I had blue cross before I got mixed up in that assemblies of god cult,and a millionaire pastor who pushed my ex and I into marriage when we were both vulnerable emotionally,Before that I was eating a date,and half of it was pitted the other half wasn't.I knocked a crack in two teeth biting it.

The two broken teeth looked like one messed up tooth,and the dentist I went to had trouble finding which one was messed up.One was crowned but it was the wrong tooth,So I went back to get another root canal and the one next to it got crowned for free,and that was it or so I thought.(if I was paying out of pocket back than I wonder would that dentist have been so kind if I was paying for it in full? With 1,800 bucks was laid out right there waiting for them?).

Anyway that crown cost me around 600 bucks in the year 2000 because blue cross paid some of the cost,my mom helped and I budgeted it in..I was not married yet.I HAD insurance.

Later long after losing my blue cross,after being manipulated into a marriage by a church with shit loads of money being extorted out of it's members based on a verse in Leviticus, after that a marriage failed anyway,I lost my blue cross coverage forever.

I had good coverage under my mom,I was a disabled child,and there was a rule that was that as long as I did not marry and my mom was alive I could be insured under her.

But there is no compassion in insurance companies, you cannot make a mistake,they are so risk aversive that profits are automatic for them now,they suck the money from healthy people that cost next to nothing for them to cover and as soon as they get a 'condition' the insurance plays games because the company is unwilling to pay the person for the whole reason they got insurance for to begin with. So basically the person is discarded as not profitable.The company denies them care,care they paid for already many times over in deductibles, fees and monthly payments for years..The insurance companies are basically slow motion thieves now. To them it does not matter if I have psych issues and was manipulated by a cult and bullied into a marriage I was not ready for. Blue cross does not want to have me back with my 'pre-existing conditions'. So I lost coverage and I regret it alot.I still feel really stupid for being dumb enough to get married,and to someone who was not good to me to boot. I lost almost everything .So much for the sanctity of marriage bullshit the right wingers foam over.Insurance companies really do punish marriage for the rest of your life.Especially if you are disabled.

Anyway,
A few years later,after the divorce..
I had no insurance at all for a time. With no insurance I had to have another tooth looked at on the upper jaw. I found out it was cracked on a microscopic level and it went undetected.The dentist I went to years earlier at the time I had blue cross and got the crowns didn't find the crack.. I found out that tooth was messed up years after the initial injury only because it had developed an abscess after 5 years of being an undetected crack.It was oozing pus ,I was in pain,and it was a mess.

The dentist told me it would cost me around 2,000 bucks out of pocket to root canal and crown the tooth,if I wanted to save it.It was 300-600 bucks as dental fees varied,if I self paid,to pull it out..That is the actual cost of a dental emergency that I faced in 2007. I had no option but to pull it out. I asked my mom to help me out.I cried when I was told how much it would cost.

A year or so after that I got back on medical assistance because I was losing it again.I needed help.

My medical assistance, when I first got it,it used to cover tooth pulling, but to get a tooth pulled, I had to bring up front,150 bucks and be ready to fork it over if the tooth broke during the pull or something.The medical assistance covered fillings,cleanings and 'simple extractions'.I got another tooth pulled because the filling kept falling out and luckily it was 'simple' and I kept my 150 bucks.

Now this same medical assistance has decided out of the blue this past July saying they'll cover for cleanings twice a year and nothing else.(they sent me notification of this late in mid-August,conveniently)

I have no more coverage for pulling of teeth anymore, not even teeth that are infected,that could kill me.If any tooth in my head gets injured ,I am screwed financially. Not only would I be trying to find a cheap dentist in a county that has NONE,trying to get the non existent cash that all the dentists out here demand to be paid out of pocket,up front..I'd have to deal with pain,and the threat of death if I take too long,and the kind of stress that could make suicide seem like a viable option.

Seems some "professionals" in the field of health care don't care.They don't care that in order to pay them what they demand, I will be forced to go without food and be flat broke half a month, I will have to pay doubled up bills and paying down on that would get me behind financially.It can easily take me 6 months or more to play catch up on the bills. I'd be forced to take money out of the food budget or transport or other expenses to pay this dentist who's car costs more than I get assistance wise for an entire year!

There is something very wrong here.


So theoretically if I get another tooth injury,if that gets infected,I find it will cost me 400 bucks for a pull,plus cab fare to and from the dentist,because $400 what the average dentist charges to pull a tooth out here,and that leaves me roughly 200 bucks for an entire month to live on..It is now IMPOSSIBLE for me to get to a dentist in a dire situation.

So no matter how well I tend to my teeth, if shit happens I am shit out of luck.

Poverty is a ticket to hell if you have a fragile body,and even the healthiest of bodies is terribly fragile.In this world all bodies are vulnerable.It can be hurt, it can get sick,it can overheat or freeze.There are millions of things go wrong with it.A fragile body is something that you must have to exist.To exist you have to feed a body,water it,clothe it,keep it warm, exercise it,tend to it's health and injuries,and do quite a lot to maintain it,that is just for flesh and bones,the mind too requires maintenance and help like the body does as well.I wish bodies could be made that did not need food, shelter,sleep or warmth just to exist.But that isn't the kind of bodies we have to work with is it? Life is dangerous, it is painful and it breaks and sickens our bodies. Life is risk.

Poverty is torment that serves no purpose.But in a pay to exist kind of scam it is a tool of the wealthy.Since we live in a selfish society that believes having more than enough money is the only legit ticket to " privileges" like not dying from an abscessed tooth,many without go without and die.When this already sick pay to exist situation is made worse by greed and abuse of power it becomes an inhuman burden to prop up the rich. Poverty is hell.Even with *cough* medical assistance.

And bottom line is NONE of us chose to be born, to have the bodies we have,the limits and weaknesses we have,we never got to pick out our own genetics,pick our birth parents, choose what kind of family we wanted to be raised in, or what town,and newborn babies have no say in what income their future parents would have.But the wealthy like to think they deserve to have more than they can ever use in 30,40,100 lifetimes because they won big on the birth lottery and we didn't hit the jackpot and have Rockefeller as a last name.Why should we accept financial abuse from the wealthy few and maintain their lives of luxury because we are not born rich,or in the social circles that give them opportunities most of us will never have like the rich take for granted?

We bear the costs of the rich peoples lifestyles.They just take from everyone and give close to nothing in return.That is an abusive relationship. We tolerate this lie drummed into us from day one that the rich are more deserving than ourselves because they are better because they have. Truth is,we all want to be healthy, feel safe,to not have to struggle day after day,to find meaning in our lives,to have enough,to grow, to take time to explore things,to learn,to be loved, to matter to others,feel joy,to count for something,even if we have nothing.

And the rich think it is they alone who deserve this.

And it seems to me people that have too much are never satisfied with what they have,so they take more ,take it from those who have less,and believe they are unworthy. The rich and corporate are like schoolyard bullies extorting lunch money from the smaller kids.

Financial abuse is wrong and it is evil.Sadly our culture tolerates too much abuse,including financial abuse.And it has to stop somewhere.The corporate bullies need dis-empowered until the Ceo and corporate executives all realize this 'corporation' they have only exists on paper and it is a servant that was designed to help ALL people live better lives..not an extortion racket for the so called 'owners' of said paper fiction called a "corporation" .

Being wealthy should not come at the expense of others well being.How this injustice happened to most of humanity and why it happened and why such lies and abuse is still tolerated by millions who have less I do not know.

But our culture thrives because of the misery foisted upon the lives of billions who go without, all so a few with more than they can ever consume will never suffer want. It's SICK! It's WRONG! But this practice by the wealthy and their tools the corporation go on keeping people afraid and abused,making them more willing to work more for less back.Greed never goes away when one over valued class of people gets away with exploiting and abusing the other classes for profit and to hold domination over how they live their lives. Every top must have a bottom.
If a society accepts as true the class based myth that some have a mandate to have authority over most.