Unemployed & Uninsured in a Pandemic
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Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host, Brenda Gazzar.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected those who lost their jobs and their health insurance? What has been the emotional and the financial toll? Cathy Munzer, a fitness instructor from New York, shares her personal struggle to make ends meet while getting the health care she desperately needs.
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Welcome to Code WACK!, Cathy.
Munzer: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Q: Cathy, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you and where do you live?
Munzer: I’ve been in the fitness industry for 25-plus years, born and raised in Manhattan. I’m residing right now in Flushing Queens. I do teach group fitness classes. I do one-on-one training so I teach at a couple different box gyms throughout New York City.
Q: Thank you. How has your life changed since the coronavirus pandemic?
Munzer: Financially, it’s been a nightmare and it’s been extremely stressful. That is the biggest issue, the finances. And, you know, getting behind on my bills, which I don’t like to do, obviously I mean it’s just not pretty and I lost my health insurance. So, these were pretty major financial and then, you know, losing health insurance, as a result of, you know, not being able to afford the plan and, well, first obviously, losing it through my employer, and then not being able to afford it on my own.
Q: So you lost your job during the pandemic?
Munzer: Yeah, look, the idea was that we were being furloughed. So, we were all going to get our jobs back once this pandemic was over but we didn’t think I mean no one thought it was gonna last this long, we thought oh, by this summer, everything will be back and running. Ah no, it did not. So that’s when I knew I’m not going back to work anytime soon, and we didn’t have a date. There was a lot of uncertainty. So, yes, that was also kind of scary, you know, here you are working, business as usual and all of a sudden you’re told to stay at home and you can’t work anymore, and you just feel so powerless. It’s just… it’s hard to get used to. It’s given me, so I have to say my daughter’s my life. It’s given me a lot of time to spend with her so that is a huge gift.
Q: How did you have your health insurance before the pandemic? Was it through your employer?
Munzer: Yes, so I had through one of my employers. Now they were in the process of, they had sold a few of their clubs. They were already kind of moving out of the fitness area so that’s when we all lost our health insurance. It was right around COVID that that started to change. So once COVID hit, I knew I was never getting that insurance back and they’re not opening up any of their clubs, so they’re gone, they’re gone completely.
I mean I’m grateful that I’ve two other places that I work at that are opened, that are back in business, which is great but that was the company that went out, I lost it completely. So they were already having financial issues or, they were doing some changes pre-COVID. First of all the marketplace, it’s not, you know, it was not cheap for me. It wasn’t like crazy expensive but it’s not cheap but the problem was that I had a huge deductible.
So it was like why do I have insurance because it feels like I don’t have insurance? And then on top of that, having to pay the premium — so that was just really, really stressful, and I do have to see a doctor once a month. It’s crucial because I do get migraines so I have to go back for checkups with my migraines and get my prescription renewed. It’s not like I go to a doctor once in a blue moon, so that was my plan, it felt like I wasn’t even on one.
Q: So how did losing your health insurance affect you?
Munzer: It was another financial issue because now I had to basically pay out-of-pocket for my visits to the doctor and for my medication because that was not covered. So that’s when I knew I couldn’t pay the insurance because I couldn’t pay the insurance, and on top of because there was a deductible, pay all these costs out of pocket, so I went without insurance, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was so stressed because of this, you don’t want to just pay out of pocket I don’t know what I’m going to do, you know, I was just kind of like, do what I had to do and hopefully, pray, praying that things would change and I’d be able to get insurance that I can afford or that works for me. So it’s been hard.
Q: Yeah, didn’t you have to go to the emergency room for was it kidney stones?
Munzer: Oh yeah, I had a really bad bout of kidney stones and I’ve had them before, extremely painful. And I was praying that this would never happen. I said well hopefully let’s cross our fingers that I don’t have to go to an emergency room because that would just really… and sure enough, I had to go. I was in that much pain. Urgent Care couldn’t help.
Urgent Care is when you have a bruise or strain or… I mean this was just really, you know, way beyond that. So yeah so now I’m stuck with paying bills that I have fallen behind with with my doctors group but also now I’ve got the emergency room, so they’re very nice. They’re very sweet. The billing department is very very nice. So now I just have to set up a plan, just like I’m on a plan with the doctor’s office, their group, which, you know, so they’ve been very understanding about this, because so many other Americans are in this situation. You know a lot of them couldn’t afford health care because of this.
You’re talking about people that were in industries that are completely no longer, and they’re not coming back some of them. So unfortunately this is what’s happening, people are losing their health insurance and I think the scariest part for me as a woman, I have checkups, mammograms and sonograms, I have to get that once a year — colonoscopy, at least with the insurance that I had with, with a huge deductible that would have been covered. I had to put that on hold.
Q: Right, so, most other developed nations have universal health care. If America had universal health care before the pandemic, like Medicare for All, how do you think your situation would have been different?
Munzer: Well … prior to COVID, if I was just working a normal job, I would have saved a lot of money, a lot of money because like I said, even with my insurance, even with the insurance that I had, which was decent — it was through Aetna — I still had to pay a lot of things out of pocket, so I mean I’m all for, you know, universal health care. I think it’s, I look at other countries, and I think that that’s the kind of a model that we should go by. You’re talking about your health. This is really important.
Thank you, Cathy Munzer.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV App. You can also subscribe to Code WACK! wherever you find your podcasts. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for health care reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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