Civilized Health Care

The Bonds of Generations

She would be just another nameless victim, a true elder who inspired everyone who met her, but reduced to homelessness through no fault of her own. She has a name, of course--it's Rosie Kreidler, age 62. And she had a past. An Olympic athlete. A nurse, who had applied to join Doctors Without Borders and go to the Congo. Until an automobile accident started her on a journey that many Americans have taken, particularly older Americans. And many more will take in the coming decade, as baby boomers age into vulnerability.

No one outside of the people she met might ever have known her story. Except that somehow, someone found out that her nephew is Barry Bonds, one of the most famous men in America. Not even he knew of her plight.

But her story is the story of many others, and will be the story of countless others, until this country fixes its disreputable health care system, and puts human health and human dignity above the greed of a powerful few.

She was known as Rosie Bonds when an automobile accident left her badly injured. She might have eventually become well enough to resume her career, but her insurance company denied her the treatments she needed.

Having been released from a hospital into physical therapy, she battled with insurers to cover her treatment. About $50,000 in coverage ran out fast, as did her savings; her 18 months of physical therapy ended when the money did, not because she had recovered. Her Social Security Disability Insurance application was rejected; she challenged the rejection in court and lost.

Eager to go back to work because she loved nursing and was desperate to pay her mounting bills, she returned to the Bay Area in 2005. But constant pain made bending or lifting impossible, and numbness in her hands prevented her from drawing blood or inserting an IV.
Her career as she had known it was finished. Destitute and unable to work, too proud to turn to her family or friends for help, she soon was sleeping in her car.

Read this story, of a woman of rare courage and accomplishment, who nevertheless was reduced to poverty and indignity, and consigned to needless pain, because this country will not take care of its people.

Barry Bonds was born in 1964, the last year of the postwar baby boom as designated by demographers. Rosie Bonds was born just 20 years before, in 1944. Let's hope he sees this not only as a family tragedy but as a cause for his own generation. America needs to join the civilized world, with a health care system that works.