Old lady gives finger to giant health corp

An 82-year-old woman in Marin County can't walk and thus has refused to leave her hospital bed for a year, saying:

"When you pay Kaiser insurance month after month for 50 years like I have, you expect to be treated like a good patient and a human being," Nome said the other day from her hospital bed. "If I had known that Kaiser would take me for only a couple of days and then would expect my family to take care of me, I would have paid my family what I paid for insurance."

I love this story, and the Chronicle did a good job with it, pointing out that it's merely an extreme example of the problem where:

People like Nome pay for insurance all their lives and expect a certain level of care when they get old. So, health care advocates say, it should not come as a surprise that they get angry when they discover their needs are not covered -- even if some don't complain and few take their grievances to anywhere near the extreme that Nome has.

"It does point out that there is a lack of long-term care policy in this country," said Anthony Wright, the executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California. "It is a patchwork system in terms of what kind of institutions and what kind of home-based care is available, and a lot of people fall through the cracks."