Unintended Consequences, Part 1

Unintended consequences can be the hardest kind to live with.

When people voted in the USA’s midterm election, they seem to have been mostly venting their current unhappiness by voting against incumbents, without much thought to whether each incumbent has or has not been striving to improve the national situation. I’m sure voters did not intentionally vote to discard foundation pieces of economic recovery. I’m sure they did not intentionally vote to make people they know suffer more from health troubles than necessary. I’m sure they did not vote to prevent Americans abroad from returning home.

All of those are likely to be unintended consequences of the way people voted.

I can only go back to live in the USA if I either become a millionaire several times over, or health care reform actually occurs in the States. When I left, I had been declared “uninsurable for health care in the United States” (yes, that’s a direct quotation) at any price due to pre-existing conditions. If health care reform is dismantled, I must remain an expat, whether or not that is what I want.

Ironically, the big nail in that coffin is an error in the Medical Information Bureau’s file about me. Several years ago, a doctor prescribed a preventive treatment to make sure I would not develop a particular disorder. It worked, so I never developed the disorder. But he knew I had traditional health insurance that would not pay for preventive care. He recorded his prescription as treatment for the very disorder we were preventing.

I’m sure he thought he was doing me a favor to get my insurer to pay for the medicine. I can’t ask him because he died before I found out he had put this in my file. The insurer passed it along to the MIB where all insurers can see it, and where it made me uninsurable.

The MIB is not like a credit bureau at which you can challenge errors and get them removed. Once an error is in the MIB, you are stuck with it for the rest of your life.

So… although I wanted to live abroad for a while at some point in my life, I was pushed into it at a particular time by unintended consequences of an action my doctor probably meant as a favor. The victors in the midterm elections campaigned heavily on a platform of dismantling health care reform. They might like to have my expertise and that of other health care expats back in the States to help jumpstart economic recovery, but as an unintended consequence of wrecking health care reform, no one like me will be able to afford to return.

We all cause consequences we didn’t intend. Sometimes they are bad. Sometimes they are good—I do now live abroad, which I wanted to do someday, and it is every bit as much of a growth experience as I hoped it might be. But we owe it to ourselves and everyone around us to think about what we caused. When we cause something bad that we didn’t mean to do, we should learn from it and try not to do it again.