Has Your Life Become Too Much A Game Of Chance?

Last November Campbell and his colleagues got their answer. The Labor Department rejected their request, saying "the performance of services does not constitute production of an article," as required by law. In short, if you work in a factory and lose your job to imports, you get help. If you are in a service industry and your job is moved abroad, you don't qualify. They lost the game.

That's the way Congress runs it. They rig it, which is why 44 million people have no health insurance, why tens of millions who do have insurance don't have a clue what it covers until it's too late, and why you pay more for your prescription drugs than do people anywhere else in the industrialized world (see following story). Worst of all, the biggest losers in the health-care lottery are middle-income folks and the working poor, who are least able to afford to pay for medical services. In fact, if you are uninsured and are admitted to a hospital in an emergency, you will be charged at a higher rate than seniors covered by Medicare or working people with health insurance through their employers. And if you fail to come up with the money, you may lose your house or have your wages attached. All that is certain is that you don't want to be on the losing end of Congress's lottery. Ask Jim Wester of Las Vegas.

Wester runs his own one-man welding business. His income is solidly middle class. And he has a health-insurance policy--albeit one with a $3,000 deductible--to cover himself, his wife Richelle and a teenage daughter. Wester thought the couple's newborn son Hunter would automatically be covered. He thought wrong. That was his first lottery loss.

When 9-month-old Hunter spent 18 days in Sunrise Hospital, where he was treated for a brain aneurysm, the Westers received a bill for $135,000. Bills from other doctors and health-care providers brought the total to $180,000. Wester says he began making payments on the hospital bill, but they weren't enough. Sunrise turned the bill over to a collection agency and then sued. A judge knocked the total bill down to $98,000, which included court costs and attorney fees. An attorney suggested bankruptcy, but then a friend of a friend who worked for a medical-billing company negotiated the collection agency down to a single payment of $40,000. The Westers took out a loan against their house to pay it off. They still owe a second collection agency more than $30,000 for other medical services. "I work my butt off practically every day," says Wester. "I don't buy things I can't afford, and I basically save every penny I have." He drives a truck that's worth less than $1,000, and his wife drives one that's 14 years old.