Donut holes.

If it's good enough for indigent senior citizens and flipper people, I suppose it's good enough for me?

So at the ol' jobby job today they revealed to us our benefit plan for 2007, and the biggest surprise was the fact that our health insurance offerings no longer include HMOs or PPOs but instead are Medicare Part D style donut-hole coverage.

For those of you not familiar with the bloated fiasco of a scandal that is Medicare Part D, here's how it works.

Medicare pays 75% of the cost of seniors' drugs for the first $2250 after a $250 deductible. Then, at $2500, coverage stops entirely.

Medicare doesn't pay a red cent of the next $2600, meaning that seniors have to pay 100% of their drug costs out of pocket. After the $5100 mark, coverage resumes at a higher rate.

That's pretty much how our 2007 coverage works, and this seems to be the trend in health insurance.

Basically, there's three different tiers of coverage, ranging from $9 to $50 a week. And basically you have to guesstimate the amount of money that you're going to spend on medical expenses the next year.

The only people for whom this kind of scheme would work are those with predictable chronic illnesses.

If you're healthy, one of two things can happen. Either you can guess too low and get slammed with a catastrophic illness or accident that slams you with your entire donut hole at once (and then makes you pay a stiff percentage of the subsequent coverage), tough luck, too bad, you lose. Or you guess too high, stay healthy, and the bastards at the health insurance company make money on your sorry overinsured ass.

This is just yet another degradation in the state of managed healthcare in this country. Exactly how bad do things need to get before the government stops letting patients be victimized by an avaricious and cruel industry where dishonesty, willful ignorance and exploitation are the standard operating procedure?

I know right-wingers like to claim that universal health coverage will lead to Soviet style bread lines, but really, let's get real for a second. Let's, for the sake of argument, grant the wingers their worst fear: the dreaded LINE. (Because god forbid, if you actually make healthcare accessible, people might want to use it.)

I wait 45 minutes to an hour past the time of my appointment to see my doctor anyway. Waiting is not the worst thing in the world.

Staying sick because you can't afford to get well is worse - for patients, for their employers due to lost productivity, and due to everybody who eventually winds up footing the bill when their conditions make medical treatment inevitable.

Going broke because you failed to anticipate that you'd be paralyzed or get cancer is worse. And the problem's not just with uninsured. Health insurance companies are so pigfuckingly merciless about denying claims that even being insured is no insurance. The fact is, health insurance companies have every financial incentive to deny and deny and deny claims as long as humanly possible, and the current regulatory environment allows them to do just that.

If you like watching your health coverage turn to shit, vote Republican this November.