Health Care Story – Bernie & Priscilla King

In the words of Priscilla King:
Bernie retired in 1993.  I retired a few years later in 1997 from a disability. At first I wasn’t receiving disability, so we had to use funds we’d saved to get me from 57 years old to 62 years old, when I started to receive disability benefits. It helped a lot when the paperwork went through, but the funds were already used up by that point. We had no cash reserve left.

Today, we have to have all kinds of insurance. When I reached 65 years old, we went on Medicare. When you’re on Medicare, you have to have a supplement – Part D. they all cost money so even though we were both collecting Social Security at that point, a lot of our money was going to health care.

As a result, today we pay $600 per month for health care between insurance and prescriptions.

It means that at the end of the month, after we’ve paid our rent, car payment and one credit card, we have $87 a week to live on. Well, we have to buy gas out of that, food, stamps, any car maintenance, clothes, haircuts, gifts for our grandchildren. We actually haven’t been able to afford gifts for our grandchildren for years now. We’d like to eat out once in a while, but we don’t get to do that either, or anything else we want to do.

I carry my little monthly budget around with me so I can show any politician we run up against just how poor we are now because of health care. If it wasn’t for that, we could live very nicely.

I know you have to pay for it, I know we have to pay something, but $600 a month to me is just too much to be expected to pay out of your Social Security money. I’ve been asking each of the Presidential candidates to put health care and Social Security at the top of their domestic agenda.

Special insight: Priscilla walks through their monthly budget. Click here for the video.