Miss Homeless USA

Blair Griffith, Miss Colorado and a contestant in the Miss USA pageant, was made homeless when she was evicted with her mother and brother after her sick mother could not pay both the rent and her mounting medical bills. Griffith's mother, a widow, lost her health insurance soon after suffering a severe heart attack. She was unable to get another policy. Debt collectors were relentless in pursuing money she owed for her medical care.

45,000 Americans die every year because they can't afford – and in many cases can't even obtain – health insurance.

Insurance companies, in their constant quest to meet profit expectations, routinely cancel the coverage of sick policyholders and strive to spend less and less of premium dollars on medical care so they can divert more and more of those dollars to executive salaries and dividends for investors. Millions of Americans with a history of illness are considered "uninsurable" by private insurers. Even non-profit insurers refuse to sell coverage to a third or more of Americans who apply because they have been sick in the past. Of those they turn down, many are children born with birth defects.

A man in North Carolina was arrested for robbing a bank for $1 so he could get government-provided healthcare in prison. Richard James Verone, 59, has a tumour in his chest and two ruptured discs but, like 51 million Americans, no job or health insurance. Verone told reporters he asked for only a dollar to show that his motives were medical, not monetary. Because of his "pre-existing" conditions, no private insurer would have anything to do with him. He wasn't poor enough to qualify for Medicaid – the government programme for low-income Americans – or old enough to qualify for Medicare, for those aged 65 and over.

Wendell Potter, of the US healthcare firm Cigna, told a Senate committee: "I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/12/nhs-reform-lansley-warning