Letter to the editor: Why doesn't the Navajo Nation offer a health plan option?

To the editor:

Why doesn't the Navajo Nation offer a health plan option?

I am Navajo, I grew up on the Navajo reservation, I live in Flagstaff, and I am four and a half months pregnant. The other factor that stands out about me is that I currently do temp work through a staffing agency, which means no health insurance offered. While a secure job was only recently an issue for my economic situation, the issue with insurance is not new. My prior position with a non-profit organization in Flagstaff offered good pay, good vacation pay accrual, a decent retirement plan, and even decent dental and vision insurance; it did not offer decent health insurance. I could sit here and talk all day about the state of privatized insurance and how none of how it currently operates should legally be allowed to happen, however as a public health professional and an ever striving optimist I instead came to the question "Why doesn't the Navajo Nation offer a health plan option?"

While I am well aware that there is the Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation option in Flagstaff (Sacred Peaks Health Center), this is merely a band-aid for the intermittent health issues that come up. Being pregnant I would like the opportunity to build a relationship with my care provider who I would reasonably assume would be the individual delivering my baby when the time comes. It's stressful enough giving birth, but to have someone you've never met deliver your baby because the doctor you spent the last 9 months with doesn't have the availability to do so, what sounds fair about that? I receive my care at North Country Health Care in Flagstaff and thus far with the lack of insurance I have racked up bills totaling nearly $2000 already, this not including the hospital bills I will most definitely accrue come October. Heaven forbid that I have to go through another cesarean section which, last time, gave me a whopping $10,000 hospital bill. Contract health? No pe! I am not eligible to receive that service as I am not living on the reservation.

Maybe other urban Native Americans don't share my sentiment, but the experience that I've had as far as health care goes gives me the notion that since I no longer reside on the Navajo Nation I am no longer their "responsibility". When there is a deficit somewhere, you can complain, or you can offer a solution. How revolutionary would it be for a nation to put people before money and tackle the robbery of the middle class through privatized insurance? A non-profit solution for urban Navajos to receive quality health care where they live with reasonable premiums that will offer coverage for a variety of needs is how that could be done. The last privatized insurance I had required me to pay nearly $500 per year on top of what the employer paid for ONE preventive doctor visit a year, ONE! The average routine preventive doctor visit and labs wouldn't come close to what was being paid in premiums every year. Sure they covered everything once I reached my $10,000 deductible, but as a young healthy woman, how would I ever expect to reach that?

There are a little more than 300,000 members of the Navajo Nation, if you took the approximate 6,000 Navajo people residing in Flagstaff and had them enroll in a health insurance option offered through the Navajo Nation, requiring them to pay the premiums on their own with those premiums approximately $800 for the year per person (this comes to less than $70 per month per person) you would have a pot of money of $4,800,000 to go towards reimbursing medical providers. This of course wouldn't take into account the different payment tiers based on age, health habits and coverage options.

An option such as this to add to what is available to urban Native Americans who are ineligible for state assistance, unable to access IHS or tribal facilities and need an option to replace the insurance system that takes advantage of us currently would be a Godsend.

Caroline McDonald

Flagstaff