My name is Peter Simpson.  In 2002, I had a medical emergency, and my family took me to the emergency room at the HMO that does my health care.  I was there for about a day and was sent home without being told specifically what was wrong with me.  They checked and made sure that my heart was okay.  But I wasn’t able to walk.  I was tremendously dizzy and sea-sick.  I had a bunch of physical problems, and my stamina was gone.  I was just really in bad shape.

Over the next several months, I slowly recovered, and I started looking at information on the Internet and started to think that maybe I had had a stroke.  So I went to my primary care doctor and asked him if I could have an MRI which is them taking a picture of the inside of your head to see what’s up with your brain.  And they weren’t happy about it because it’s an expensive procedure, but they ordered one.  And when I came back, the doctor said, yes, there is a mark in your lower brain that might mean something. 

So he referred me to a neurologist.  The neurologist looked at the picture and told me, yes, there is a mark in your lower brain which would be consistent with a stroke that could have the symptoms that you reported, but I don’t really think that’s what happened, and the medication that they’ve given you for the blood thinner that is the stroke prevention thing probably isn’t necessary either.  I just want you to take a baby aspirin every morning.

I really felt like I had been improperly diagnosed, that I hadn’t received the care that I should have been given, the opportunities for rehabilitation, and that basically dollars drove the decision process that the medical care givers had in my case.  I resented the fact that the profit motive controlled their ability to provide care for me as a patient. 
And five years later, I’m pretty okay now.  But I’m pretty angry about the fact that they treated me that way.  I don’t think it’s okay.  It’s against ethics, and it’s against what’s basically right. 

I’m also an employer.  I have a small business.  I have six employees that get health care benefits with their employment.  Their average salary is probably about $30,000.  The cost of their medical care has gone up again and again.  I’ve just gotten my renewal notice from the same insurance company for the same employees.  No one’s turned 60.  There’s no reason for significant increases.  But the costs are up between 10 and 25 percent per employee.  Some of my employees who make $30,000 are having medical insurance costs more than $6,000 a year.  I mean, the proportion there is tremendous.  The impact on me as an employer trying to bear those costs is becoming more than more difficult. 

I had a situation a while back where I lost a service contract. I had a decision to make about a part-time employee.  I might have tried to keep that person in their job if I had been able to move money over a little bit within the budget by trimming some costs.  But the overall cost of running my agency made it to the point where I wasn’t able to keep them employed.  I had to lay them off.  And one of the biggest factors in the costs that drive my agency’s inability to do business like that is the medical insurance.  It’s just prohibitive. 

I’ve been here seven years with my company, and I think over that period of time our costs have gone up somewhere around 75 percent.  And the trend seems to be that they’re going up higher and higher all the time.  I have a great deal of sympathy for small employers who can’t or won’t offer medical care benefits for their lower-paid employees, because I understand the agony of the decision of how do you justify paying $6,000 a year just for the medical benefits for a person who is making $9 an hour?  It just doesn’t make dollars and cents, and it’s very difficult.