If you want to know why the insurance companies are enemy #1 when it comes to health reform, read this:

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem.

Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

In the insurance company world of greed and money, rape is a pre-existing condition. Shouldn’t that be criminal?

This is why we’re marching on the insurance companies tomorrow.

These companies need to be taken down a notch. They need their anti-trust exemption revoked, and they need competition from a public health insurance option, so people like Christina will at least have somewhere to go when a heartless bureaucrat denies them the medicine they needs to keep them healthy after their rape.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

I’m proud to work for Health Care for America Now