Those of us in Disability-ville who are lucky enough to have comprehensive private insurance, or Medicare backed by private insurance, live in a fantasy world. We have little or no idea what health care really costs. I get these complicated EOB’s (Explanation of Benefits) from my secondary insurer, the Writers Guild Health Fund, and after Medicare and “discounts” weigh in, I am left with co-payments of the magnitude of $6.35 or $11.36. Occasionally they go over $100, but rarely. Not knowing what things really cost in most cases, I blithely go along paying these petty sums and hoping that some loophole in the coverage or a dismantling of Medicare doesn’t send me into bankruptcy.

Jim Troesh, an actor and writer in Hollywood who just happens to be a C-4/5 quad, lives in the real world of medical costs. Only with significant help from the California health program, Medi-Cal, can he live an independent life that requires around-the-clock caregivers. With this help, he gets up every morning in his own apartment, eats his own food, drinks his own coffee, and starts pecking away on his computer with his mouth stick or gets on the speaker phone and hustles work. His daily life is not too different than any other writer cum actor in LA, or creative freelancer in general, but it’s only made possible with his support team. What if Medi-Cal, in a state that is twenty-five billion dollars or so in the red, gets the hatchet?

Well, Medi-Cal just got hacked up brutally, forcing the 7.7 million people statewide who receive benefits from the program to pay more out of pocket for every possible service and be limited to only seven doctor visits a year. I was just ill with a series of infections and made more than seven doctor visits in a week. To Jim Troesh, the impact of these cuts will be immediate and painful – the state plans to cut by 10 percent the rate Medi-Cal pays health-care providers. That means, according to Jim, he will have to come up with more than $18,000 a year to continue to live the life he is living today.

So media savvy Jim decided to fight back and speak for the hundreds of thousands of Californians staring at the same future. He put his story on video, direct to camera, and posted it on YouTube. His opening lines: “My death warrant is sitting on the governor’s desk, right now. If he signs it, I’ll be dead within a year.” Watch it yourself here.

What Jim explains, in short, is that the 10% cut in his round the clock care will force him to bite the financial bullet and go into a nursing home. When he says he will die, it won’t be from lack of medical care. He will die from losing his independence. In Jim’s condition, not to mention his decades of living on his own, if he can’t be as free and independent as possible, he says, “Why bother?” It might take more than a year, but Jim is a funny, creative, life-loving quad with a long list of Hollywood credits and nursing home life would do him in sooner or later. For him, it truly is a fate worse than death.

My favorite line in the video, all written by Jim, of course, is when he makes reference to the German term for nursing homes during WW2: “Institutions for Useless People.” Is that sentiment still alive in some lawmakers’ fervid brains?

The local LA Channel 11 News saw the video and did a long feature story on Jim and his plight. (You can see that, too, at here). After laying out Jim’s situation, the reporter called up the governor’s office, gave them the link to the video, and got this response, in part, from a spokeswoman: “It’s very sad. It’s very moving. The impact of these cuts on vulnerable Californians is something we are thinking about every day…”

In other words, Jim got a rave review for his video but only empty words of concern. The cuts have yet to take effect and may never take effect if the federal government doesn’t approve them. While he waits for that shoe to drop, Jim has a new plan: to raise the funds to travel to Sacramento, cameraman in hand, and meet Governor Brown in person and convince him to find another way to cut the state budget. Instead of “Roger And Me,” you might call it “Jerry And Me.”

And why are they having to make Draconian budget cuts like this in the first place? Is it something to do with a brutal recession set in motion by greedy Wall Street sellers of obscure instruments like CDO’s and CDS’s collateralized by, ah, nothing? I don’t see many of them moving into institutions, either medical or penal. I guess when it comes to the real cause of our collective pain, we all are living in a fantasy world.