Yesterday I spent the day doing something that was very disturbing. I was giving moral support to my wife and her sister as they tried to make certain their aunt was going to get the medical care that she needs.

This is the situation: Lorraine Lee is 89 and retired from the school system in Tacoma. She has paid for health insurance for all of her adult life.

Lorraine fell and broke her hip and had to go into Cottesmore Nursing Home until she gets well enough to go back to Sound Vista Assisted Living.

Both facilities have been very good to Lorraine. She was doing her physical therapy and getting better.

Now comes the problem: The Insurance Company, Secure Horizons by United Health Care. What a joke that name is.

Lorraine is not even close to being able to care for herself again and she was informed with only two days notice that they were going to stop paying for her medical care and she had to go back to Sound Vista.

We talked to the social worker at Cottesmore and was informed that is common. The insurance companies do everything they can to not pay for the medical care that the patient has been paying them (for decades) to take care of. The social worker stated that it is awful how the insurance companies treat the people who they exist because of. They just don’t want to pay anything.

Lorraine’s health has nose-dived because of the stress put on her because she doesn’t know if she will receive health care that she already paid for.

Let’s be truthful. Whatever your political affiliations are, the truth is grim in this country. The politicians and the people who make the decisions regarding what health care is available in the USA only serve themselves. All rhetoric about how they are concerned about your welfare are just empty words to get your votes and your money.

We live in the world’s most wealthy nation. We do not have a health care system. The rich get what they want. Everyone else is left out in the cold begging for whatever they can get, if they can get anything.

Contrast Lorraine’s story with these two: In the early 1980s, I lived in England where a friend had a bad car accident. He spent six months in the hospital and came out with no hospital bills. He was able to rebuild his life.

I spoke with a Canadian author who told me his daughter had a disease that would cost millions to treat here. In Canada, treatment was free. Do you think that he would ever move his family to the USA?

If you think that with socialized medical care, you’ll pay for someone else’s bill, think again. Unless you die young, you will get old. It happens to everyone. You will need medical care. When you are at your most vulnerable and can’t fight for yourself is when you will be taken advantage of and denied what you paid for.

In closing, I am proud to be an American and ashamed of the medical care system we have and the new one proposed. Despite the possible backlash from political correctness advocates, I cannot with a good conscience remain silent any longer.

The American public has been lied to for far too long.

Bob L. Morgan, Federal Way