Please forgive me for a second off-topic post – I just felt I needed to say something.

Blue Shield is behaving worse than despicably to my family in a health care coverage issue that has nothing to do with eczema. (My coverage is through a federal plan, so I do not have the usual recourse through states and state courts, please do not write with suggestions regarding rights I don’t have, it’s too depressing.)

There isn’t much anyone can do – unless you happen to have some superhuman clout at Blue Shield – but I’d ask the following if you want to help:

1) Get involved. Just in general. My situation is just one of millions. We need to fix our health care system, no one should have to go through this.

2) I get so many heartfelt letters of thanks from parents for the site and how it has helped them. In many cases I hear from people whose children had the worst cases of eczema you can imagine, who are able to then live eczema free because of the information.

If you are one of them, please consider sitting down and estimating how much money this solution saves in medical costs annually that your insurance company might otherwise have been on the hook for: doctors’ visits, medications, even hospitalizations. Although you may have more expenses at home in implementing this, for example installing a water softener, insurance doesn’t typically pay for those. However, they do get the benefit of NOT having to pay indefinitely for the medical interventions that you or your child would have otherwise needed had the eczema continued.

Please write to me and tell me about it. I will not use your name, only tally the numbers: X dollars saved in X number of cases. Please contact me through the web site, www.solveeczema.org, through the feedback link on the home page.

I have seen statistics on the average cost of eczema patients’ annual medical care. If I use those numbers, and just the people I know of whose eczema-related medical expenses essentially went to zero after using my site, well, that’s a huge amount of money. But real numbers mean a lot more than statistics.

If my husband and I just had the time we’ve had to spend on this medical paperwork for the last two and half years (to no avail) to spend on this site instead, and the time we’d have saved because of just having the use of our family’s savings which is now essentially wiped out, we could save even just our own insurer many times what they are trying to avoid responsibility for here.

Not that I believe making that argument to them is going to change anything, but I can always hope. At the very least, they need to hear that sometimes they are not just being immoral, they could save more money overall just by doing the right thing.