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With no insurance, broken arm becomes long ordeal
Richard Hershman couldn't find a doctor to fix his broken arm. When he finally did, his arm needed to be rebroken.
Richard Hershman, 62, has this advice for his daughter: "Everything I did in life, everything I do - you do the opposite, and you'll be fine."
That goes double for health insurance. He didn't have it earlier this year when he broke his arm, and suffered - literally - because of it.
Hershman had every opportunity in life - loving parents, middle-class upbringing in Overbrook, presidency of his elementary school. But his parents imposed no discipline, he said, no limits.
Soon he was into 1960s love and drugs. And more drugs. In 1974, at 27, he said, he saw his cousin, with whom he shared a bedroom like a brother, leap through a 10th-floor window on City Avenue. He said he was the one who persuaded the family to pull the plug on his brain-dead cousin, let his kidneys save somebody else's life.
That propelled him into even more drugs.
"I did everything I could not to feel anything," Hershman said, "because I was so torn up inside."
For many years, he did have health insurance through the fund-raising company he worked for. Hershman solicited over the phone, raising money for the firefighters fund, or the state police auxiliary. But the owner dropped Hershman from the plan, he said, because his ailments were driving up costs for everyone.
A lifelong smoker, Hershman said he now can work only part-time at best, and has no money to buy private insurance. He takes methadone to ease the pain from his years of drug addiction. He suffers badly from emphysema, and is on oxygen 24 hours a day.
He lives in a small, messy apartment on Rhawn Street in Northeast Philadelphia. He's been divorced four times. His daughter, 24, helps when she can, he said, but she's living her own life, and who can blame her. A social worker with Jewish Family and Children's Services looks in on him.
Hershman has one friend in the world, his beautiful, devoted dog, Blue, an 8-year-old border collie.
On Jan. 17, Hershman was out in front of his apartment, giving Blue a short walk. He slipped on the ice. His bones are as brittle as twigs because of years on the steroid prednisone to treat his diseased lungs.
His arm snapped.
An ambulance took him to the emergency room at Nazareth Hospital, where, he said, "I was in and out like a car wash."
The ER staff X-rayed his arm, stabilized it in a splint, and told him to follow up with an orthopedic surgeon, because he was going to need surgery.
He called the Rothman Institute on Holme Avenue, across from Nazareth Hospital.
"The first question they asked me was, 'Do you have insurance?'
"I said no."
"OK, bring $600. That's for your initial consultation."
"Ma'am," he says he told the woman on the phone, "I have emphysema and am borderline impoverished. I don't have $600."
She said, " 'Well, you can't come here,' " he recalled.
