kerkko.fi

I drove up [to Wise County]. It was 50 miles. And I got to the fairgrounds. The parking lot was jam-packed. It was a rainy day. I couldn't see any activity outside the fairground gates. Once I went inside, it was such a stark contrast to what was on the outside. People were lined up by the hundreds, standing or sitting in long lines, many of them without shelter, in the rain, getting soaking wet, waiting for hours to get care that was being provided in animal stalls, in many cases, and in barns and under tents that had been set up, like MASH units at a wartorn site. And it was just so startling for me to see that.

I realized, when I saw those folks, that many of them could have been people I grew up with. My relatives could have been there. And they were people who, I learned later, most of them have jobs. They just don’t have jobs that offer insurance benefits. And a lot of them do have insurance, but they’re in these new kinds of plans that insurance companies are pushing more of us into, that have such high deductibles or limited benefits that we can’t get the care we need, even if we’re sending our premium dollars in. When I saw that, it was almost as if I was supposed to be seeing something like that to jolt me out of the complacency that I had been in for all these many years.

A trip I took on a corporate jet just a couple of weeks after that experience, flying from Philadelphia, where CIGNA is based, to its healthcare operations in Connecticut. And we were served -- the CEO and I -- lunch on gold-rimmed china, and we were given gold-plated flatware to eat it with. And we were sitting in a very luxurious leather chair, flying in a corporate jet that cost $5,000 an hour to operate, or just the jet fuel alone was $5,000. And for the first time, I was paying attention to what I was doing. And I realized that the people in Wise County and elsewhere in this country were in the predicaments they were so that I could fly around in such luxury to get from one place to another.