The Los Angeles Times
Catherine Barron and I were sitting in the living room of her little house in La Habra, trying to come up with good reasons for her to toss her husband out on his ear.
“I could say he’s a no-good bum,” Barron said, but confessed she’d be lying.
I asked if he lies about in front of the boob tube when he should be mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.
No, said Barron, 59. Her husband, Daniel, still has a lot of pep for a 76-year-old guy.
“They argue,” said grandson Joseph, 10, who was trying to be helpful. “But it’s regular marriage stuff. Like, Grandma will say, ‘I just told you that last week. Did you forget already?’ ”
The problem in the Barron household is that Catherine has a painful and debilitating bone spur on the back of her neck. A bookkeeper for 30 years, she can no longer work because of shooting pains in her back, arms and legs. She may need surgery, but she has no health insurance and hasn’t had an MRI in more than three years. She’s too young for Medicare, not quite poor enough for Medi-Cal, and got lopped off her husband’s plan when Congress eliminated family coverage for retired railroad workers when they turn 65.
“You hit your head up against the brick wall of government and say, ‘That’s it. I can’t take any more of this,’ ” said Barron.
She said she tried talking her way into County-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles but was turned away because she lives in Orange County, where she found the public health system even harder to access.
She has looked into private insurance, but her preexisting condition makes that a nonstarter; and even if she could find a private insurance company willing to sign her up, she probably wouldn’t be able to handle the premiums. Her husband’s small pension barely covers the bills as it is.
So after exhausting all her options, or lack thereof, Barron came up with a solution:
Get rid of her husband. If they legally separate, Barron said, she and their 17-year-old daughter will have a low enough income to qualify for Medi-Cal, and she can get an MRI. And with an MRI, she might be able to finally convince the Social Security Administration that she really is disabled and entitled to Medicare.
“We’re honest people,” Barron said, and she doesn’t like pretending her marriage is busted. She’s honest enough, in fact, that she confessed to a “breakup” in 2004 that got her on Medi-Cal temporarily.
Did her husband actually move out back then?
“Yeah,” Barron said. “He moved to his brother’s house in Baldwin Hills.”
But he missed her and wanted to come back home. And she eventually lost the Medi-Cal anyway, because she went back to work briefly. She lasted six weeks. There wasn’t enough Advil to get her through the workday.
This time Mr. Barron isn’t sure whether he’ll move in with his brother or his sister. When I asked him what he would tell the Social Security Administration if asked about his busted marriage, he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“I take the 5th,” he said.
All of this, of course, is absurd.
“I don’t like to break the rules, and I don’t like to bend the rules,” Mrs. Barron said. “But we should have universal healthcare in this country. We’re the only industrialized Western nation that doesn’t, and I think we’ve lost our conscience.”
She gets no argument from Jamie Court of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which has campaigned for healthcare reforms that always get derailed, largely because of the great lobbying power of a filthy rich healthcare industry that likes things as they are.
“It just shows how crazy the patchwork maze of programs is,” said Court. “These are people who worked their whole lives, and she’s not entitled to healthcare. She’s got to get divorced to get it.”
Barron told me she still hasn’t been able to pay all the bills from her last round of tests a few years ago, so she has ticked off a doctor or two, as well as an attorney who wanted too much, in her opinion, to argue her disability case to Social Security.
“When I had my last test, I was told I didn’t need surgery at the time but that I might eventually,” Barron said, and she worries that she’s closer to that point now but doesn’t have the $3,500 she estimates it will cost for another MRI.
She’s not doubled over and twisted up, so her condition is not visible to the untrained eye. You might call it a nightmare, if she could only sleep long enough to have one. She gets two or three hours at a crack before the pain rousts her, and she’s got numbness in her feet and lower legs.
Reading now from the findings of her MRI in 2003:
“Invertebral disc space narrowing is seen… as well as anterior spurring and abnormal bone marrow.”
I called Barron’s primary care physician, Stuart Finkelstein, at his office in Cerritos. He said Barron has “a significant disorder in her neck” with the possibility that bone spurs are pressuring or will eventually pressure her spinal cord, which could cause all sorts of serious trouble.
He chuckled over her plan to separate from her husband but said her predicament is typical in a healthcare system he referred to as “a disaster.” Even if she gets Medi-Cal, Finkelstein said, the misery won’t end.
“If you’re on Medi-Cal, it’s extremely difficult if not almost impossible to get a referral to an orthopedic specialist,” he said. Lots of doctors, himself included, want nothing to do with Medi-Cal because of the bureaucracy and the government’s skimpy reimbursement policies.
“It’s not because we don’t feel a conscious moral obligation,” he said. “It’s because of the frustration.”
If Barron does come to him on Medi-Cal, Finkelstein said, it would take months to set up an MRI, but he’d see what he could do.
Either that, or she’s going to have to come up with $3,500 for an MRI, and, in the Alice in Wonderland world of American healthcare, hope her condition has gotten bad enough to qualify her for disability insurance.
If they go the divorce route, I’m prepared to testify that I saw definite signs of irreconcilable differences.
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Reach the columnist at [email protected] and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.
