Fundraising for medical bills

At Issue: Families sponsoring fund-raisers in recent years to pay for medical bills in off-island medical centers.

Our View: This issue calls for resolution in order to assist families deal with a bankrupting expense.

Along panoramic beach road during weekends, what often appears as family picnic is usually fundraising activities to help defray the cost of medical bills for loved-ones in off-island medical centers.

More of these activities are becoming a common event which tells of families having come full square to facing the cost of catastrophic or long-term illnesses. The only time that families come to understand the bankrupting expense is when they actually walk through this strange valley that is both financially and emotionally draining in every sense of the word.

For medical referral patients with high option health insurance, the maximum coverage is $50,000 a year which when maxed-out, simply means families must look for ways to supplement the balance of expenses. If the means isn’t there, the patient may be denied the requisite medical care unless the medical referral program intervenes to cover additional expenses in the interim.

The medical referral program isn’t at fault when something like this happens in that its primary role is strictly administrative. But it goes to show how lightly we have treated personal health, an individual responsibility, and not that of the local government. It further goes to show the dire need to earmark public funds for preventative health care programs which must be viewed as a form of investment rather than the usual perception of cost.

For those with health insurance today, it may help you and your family deal with the whopping cost of catastrophic or long-term illnesses. But we also wish to suggest that you purchase an additional health insurance coverage to cushion such expenses when you and your family must deal with it full square.

We strongly urge local leadership and health insurance providers to converge and deal with this growing problem if anything else, but to assist families understand the dire need to prepare themselves for such bankrupting medical expense. The faster this issue is addressed and resolved, the better off families when faced with such draining experience. Si Yuus Maase`!