Benjamin Day – Massachusetts
Benjamin’s Story
In 2005, I thought I knew what I was doing with my life. I was going to school for labor education and labor research in upstate New York, but that’s when I developed a very serious panic disorder. Now, a panic disorder may not be what you think it is. I didn’t have any fears or phobias that I knew of, I would just start shaking uncontrollably and it would last for hours and hours and hours. Sometimes panic attacks would start in the middle of the night while I was sleeping.
I had no idea what was going on, I thought I had some terrible physical illness. And actually my doctors misdiagnosed me for over a month. So it just kept getting worse and worse until I couldn’t go to school anymore, I couldn’t go to work anymore, and I landed in the emergency room 3 times in a row. My doctors finally admitted me to the hospital for 3 days. And that’s how long it actually took to stabilize me, to get me on the right meds and to stop the attacks from happening.
I will never forget it: on the day I was being discharged the doctor sat me down and he said, “I don’t want you to be filled with worry or anxiety, but your insurance company has said that they’re not going to cover your hospital stay.” It didn’t fill me with worry until I saw the hospital bill, which was almost $5,000. This was at a time when I was earning about $14,000 a year, so $5,000 might as well have been $5 million – it was going to bankrupt me.
Now I’d like to say that I was an organizer, and I fought the insurance company and won. But the truth of the matter is at that particular moment, I really wasn’t in any shape to be fighting back. I was terrified about what this hospital bill might do to my future, if I couldn’t afford to pay it, and it made it really difficult to try and recover from an anxiety disorder.
So other people filed appeals for me and I was basically a completely passive victim of this entire process, and my future was left in the hands of a for-profit insurance company that had a financial interest in not giving me the care that I needed.
Two months after this healthcare nightmare, I decided to move back to my hometown of Boston, and when I was looking for work I ran into this organization called Mass-Care that was fighting for single payer universal healthcare in Massachusetts. For the first time it dawned on me that my healthcare story wouldn’t have been possible in any other developed country in the world, and it was just fundamentally wrong that my entire future could be at risk because I got sick or followed my doctor’s orders.
So I decided to completely change what I was doing with my life, and for the last 10 years I’ve been fighting for single payer, universal healthcare because I want to make sure that I’m never again the victim of a private health insurance company, and that no one else will be either.
This Speaker’s Availability
This speaker is willing to speak with reporters and is willing to speak at public events.
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