Our health system is such a disappointment—and I know this is no surprise.  I’m just caught off guard by how blatant it is becoming and how widespread it is now.  I’m experiencing an illness I need medication for and my physician called in a refill for me today.  I went to pick it up and they told me insurance wouldn’t cover it because I’ve had too many pills within a timeframe.  Now this is a specific anti-nausea medication—it’s not a narcotic or anything controlled like that.  It’s simply that the insurance company decided that I only get sick a certain amount of times a day—and that’s all I need.  If I wanted to pick it up regardless of coverage, it was over $100 for 10 pills (I know there are costs WAY worse than this, this is my experience only).

I have worked and paid into various health insurances for over 20 years of my life, I have been fortunate to only need the bare minimum up until now, I fail to understand how this happens.  How is it that insurance companies, companies we pay our money to for a service, determine when and how we get sick and what we need to get better?  There are millions of more egregious stories than mine, but how in the hell did we give them so much power over our lives?

This is just one of the millions of examples of how we need to advocate for ourselves.  No matter who it is against, no matter how small we may feel, we only have one life and there is no one interested in preserving our lives more than we are.  Their interest is strictly monetary—our interest is about our livelihood and the experience of what we want in our lives.  The problem comes when we allow systems that serve no purpose other than making a profit at our expense to take over.

I think the way to start is to stop.  Stop listening and shut everything off so we can reconnect with our inner guidance system.  Reconnect to that vital source of inherent wisdom we are told we have no access to from the time we are born.  Learn to believe in ourselves again and relearn our place in the world.  Learn how we connect to ourselves, to nature, to source, and to others.  Only when those pieces are in place again do we understand our humanity, the humanity of others, and what we really need moving forward as well as what our impact really means.  We no longer live in a bubble. 

When people struggle with something, we all do.  And it is so important to understand where the issue is.  The night I went to pick up that prescription, there were two women having a really tough time at the pharmacy—also with insurance related issues.  They began taking it out on the tech helping ring people out.  I will admit, I stood by.  I wasn’t feeling well enough to take on that battle—even though I thought about it.  This issue had nothing to do with the woman reading the verification results on the screen.  It had everything to do with the same place where my issue started as well: the insurance company.

Human nature makes it easy to take it out on the person delivering the message or even those in closest proximity to us.  That is a habit we need to rein in.  Addressing the issue outside of the source will do nothing.  Plus that tends to give the person attempting to help you an unnecessary headache as well.  Just because we are having a difficult time, we often forget that the people doing their jobs are struggling as well.  They don’t dictate the rules, they don’t want to see people suffer.  They are put in a position where they have to deliver the news the giants don’t want to deal with—because those giants know they are wrong at the end of the day.

So we need to be gentle.  Gentle with ourselves.  We need to be firm.  Firm with our boundaries.  We need to be clear.  Clear with where the issue starts.  We need to be unified.  Unified in the idea of our humanity and our common need.  We need to be honest.  Honest about the fact that things aren’t working as they are now.  We need to be awake.  Awake enough to know what we really need.  We need to get out of our own damn way.  Get out of our way and stop pretending that we have no say in what happens from here out. We need to believe.  Believe that this is something we can tackle together.