Now that I’ve been turned down by Anthem Blue Cross, Pacificare, and Kaiser for health insurance, I’m getting pretty stressed out — especially after watching Critical Condition. Thanks to reader M, I learned PBS’s Critical Condition, a docu film about health care (or the lack thereof) in the US, is available for free viewing online until Nov. 11.

Critical Condition follows 4 people who either don’t have health insurance, or lose health insurance because they have to stop working due to medical issues. The sad thing is that, due to financial reasons, many of these people had cut corners — i.e. skimping on meds they need and not getting preventive care — to then develop life threatening health problems that they can’t pay to get taken care of.

One guy with serious back pain, for example, keeps taking more and more over the counter pain meds — until he finally has to go to the ER due to ulcers caused by those meds. A woman in pain delays going to the doc because of the expense — to find out that her financial worries delayed her diagnosis until she had stage 3 cancer. Because these people without insurance are under financial constraints, they end up playing Russian roulette with their lives. In fact, 2 of the 4 people featured in the docu are now already dead.

The film’s full of scary facts about the medically uninsured. Uninsured patients charged 2.5 times what insured people are charged for the same treatments and procedures, for ex. A doc talks about how in the US, we ration care for people without health insurance. And about the back pain dude who finally gets the surgery to help him live something closer to a normal life, several doctors attest to the fact that the dude should’ve gotten help A LOT earlier than he did, and that had the dude not been part of a docu that brought him attention, he likely would never have gotten the help he needed.

To be clear, I still do have health insurance at the moment — I’ve opted to extend my student health insurance for $400 a month — but that option ends in a few months from now. So now I’m going to look into how to get nontraditional insurance. Some of you readers have kindly weighed in with advice and options; I’ll look into and evaluate those in coming posts.

In the meantime, watch Critical Condition, and sign up for updates from OneCareNow, the nonprofit that’s fighting to get universal health care for all Californians.

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