“Insurance? My whole point is I want to kill it.”
Gil Ahrens knows health insurance. One terrible accident. Years of life turned upside down. Denials of payment. Claims argued. Liens placed on property. Throughout a long and arduous struggle to get life back on track, obstacles created by insurance issues stood in the way of what should have been everyone’s focus: care. It is a story familiar, in one variation or another, to millions of Americans.
Author of the recently released Shattered, Shaken and Stirred, Ahrens began his eye-opening journey through the catacombs of our health insurance system almost simultaneously with a devastating automobile accident. He escaped with a badly mangled foot and other injuries, his wife was left paralyzed. Their three-week-old daughter survived intact — but that was about the only good news the Ahrens family would have for a very long time. For the successful California businessman/entrepreneur and his family, life was forever changed; the book tells the years-long challenge of that change.
In recent appearances and radio talks, Ahrens has spoken out against what he describes as a health system “in shambles. In its current state, health care is a bigger threat than terrorism. And needless to say, we are paying through the nose.”
Shattered, Shaken and Stirred, written in the form of a letter to his now-school-age daughter, is part description of unbearable tragedy and misfortune, and part how-to guide for rebuilding one’s spirit. But underlying it all is an unvarnished message to America from one person who has been entrapped in the system: insurance is the #1 evil of American health care.
Elsewhere around the globe are examples of how to do health care right. The world’s top ten livable cities, Ahrens points out, share one characteristic: their citizens have health care. Not health insurance, health care.
“Americans do not want coverage,” Ahrens says; “they want care.”
Does that not make sense?
