Have someone hold your elbow. Now, have them bend your arm…and then straighten it. Then, pay him/her $790.00. Your elbow feels better but the rest of you is ready to explode.

Last year I had four weeks of physical therapy on my back. I went three times per week totaling about 12 hours of treatment. Total cost: LESS than what we paid for 10 seconds of arm-bending.

My sincere best wishes to you and your family for much better times ahead.

While traveling on a business trip in another state, I was hit head-on by an uninsured motorist, who lost control of their car. A month later, after coming out of a coma, I embarked on what was to become a life long journey of recovery which has included physical rehabilitation, just to be able to walk and use my hands again, and nine surgeries over the last eight years, including one on my left eye and three on my right eye for detached retinas.

I was well insured at the time of the accident, or so I thought, with one of the “Big Name” insurance companies, but it turned out to be grossly insufficient to cover the staggering costs for procedures and treatments I never could have imagined. I soon learned how insanely expensive an “accident” can be, even if you are not the one at fault.

Whenever I read or hear about an auto accident, my blood runs cold, because I know there is often much more at stake for the parties involved than we hear about or that mere words can describe. Rarely do we get to hear the “rest of the story.” I guess I could best be described as “recovering” from a near fatal auto accident. I wish I had a dime for the many times that people have said to me how “lucky” I am to be alive. Funny, I just don’t feel lucky.

For me, “recovering” has meant much more than the daily challenges of physical endurance and a change in life style. It has also meant extraordinary stress on my family, a career change, as well as depleting all my bank accounts, including savings and retirement, and it’s not over yet.

What most people don’t know is that they too are just a heartbeat away from a taking a journey like mine; one that could easily turn their life completely upside down and take their family along for the ride from a state of “comfortably middle class” to the unimaginable destination of “despair and financial ruin.”

While I will always remain an optimist, I have zero hope that either candidate will have much chance of healing a cancerous healthcare system that is so riddled with the disease of avarice and burdened by the weight of ignorance that it will surely one day collapse upon itself; in a manner I suspect not unlike the recent financial crisis of Wall Street.

The reason for this is the lack of gut wrenching fear on the part of the average American (for now anyways) and the failure of our outdated two party system which sustains an election process that literally forces those who would hope to get elected into becoming lackeys for the well heeled special interest groups that provide the astronomical sums of money needed to get elected these days.

The question is: will right thinking Americans learn from the “Wall Street Crisis” and let those we elect know loud, clear, and often that every individual has a vote and a voice that can be heard with emails, phone calls, letters and post cards; that change is not an option?