By Robert Dean
Carter County Times
I feel like a 1950s news desk jockey when I type out the possible headlines for this piece, but I keep coming back to the tired adage: “Working Man Gets Screwed.” And as the decades pass, the headline still fits. If there’s one thing most of us can agree on — red state, blue state, anywhere in between — it’s that insurance is a scam.
You get a decent job. You pay your monthly tribute in hopes of not dying. You fill out the paperwork, pick from a list of “approved providers” like you’re ordering off a menu no one wants to eat from. And when you finally need help — boom, denial.
Not medically necessary? What is? Breathing?
They’ve turned health insurance into the world’s most elaborate shell game. The rules change depending on the day, the paperwork, or whether Mercury is in retrograde. You get sick, you think, “Thank God I have insurance,” and then you find out your insurance thinks God should pay for it.
Meanwhile, CEOs of these denial factories are out here banking $15 million bonuses for “cost containment,” which is corporate speak for “telling sick people to kick rocks.” If this is the system we’re supposed to be grateful for, maybe we need less gratitude and more pitchforks.
For John Baltisberger, this isn’t a column. It’s his life.
In 2023 John found out he had testicular cancer — and not just cancer, but the kind that spreads fast. “I’m in the car with my wife,” he told me. “I’m heading to pick up my daughter from school, and they call me like, hey, you need to go see a urologist. Like, tomorrow.”
That phone call would be the start of a long, brutal road — biopsies, losing one of his testicles, lab results, and a diagnosis no one wants to hear.
“There’s like five kinds of them,” he said. “And I had four. Including a teratoma — a tumor that can grow teeth, hair, skin. Mine didn’t have those, but it had a rudimentary spine, lungs, limbs.”
One of those four types? Highly aggressive, highly prone to spread. Baltisberger spent eight hours a day in chemotherapy for over a week. Then once a week for the rest of the month. His immune system was wiped out.
His body stopped producing testosterone. Not just low — nonexistent.
“When it dips, I want to die,” he told me. At first, he tried weekly intramuscular injections. “Superman on Monday, weepy and wrecked by Friday.” He switched to long-acting pellet implants, but they triggered polycythemia — a condition where his blood got dangerously thick, spiking his risk for stroke or heart attack. The dose was lowered. The crash still came.
He stopped writing. Stopped sleeping. “I felt like I was dying in slow motion.”
And for nearly two months, he couldn’t get his doctor to return a call. Emails. Phone messages. Even his oncologist tried to reach them. Nothing.
Then, with his blood still dangerously out of whack and no treatment in place, the clinic casually called to schedule another surgery. Furious, Baltisberger demanded to be seen. Eventually, the doctor brought him in, apologized, and prescribed an auto-injector — more expensive, but less dangerous. He got the first shot, and within hours, he felt like himself again.
And then came United Healthcare.
His doctor had prescribed the drug. It was working. But United said no. It wasn’t on their list of approved medications, and they weren’t going to pay. Never mind that it was keeping him functional, stable, alive.
Now Baltisberger — a working-class dad, husband, writer — has another bill to pay because an insurance algorithm flagged his humanity as optional.
When I asked how that felt, he didn’t say “angry.” Not first.
He said, “Despair.”
“Yes, I’m angry. But more than that, it’s despair,” he told me. “When I’m out of testosterone, I’m worthless — not because anyone around me makes me feel that way, but because I can’t do anything. I can’t accomplish anything. It’s not about, ‘Oh, I’m a man.’ It’s… ‘Am I even human if I can’t function?’ I was so weak, so low-energy, I didn’t have the will to do anything but feed my family and try to survive.”
And this man has a job. And insurance. And still got denied the basic ability to feel human — to rebuild himself after cancer — because some desk, somewhere, ran the numbers and decided he wasn’t worth it.
This isn’t just a broken system. It’s a profitable one — built to deny care until people break, and then to bill them for the privilege.
Your heart breaks for people just doing their best. But the system doesn’t. It counts on breaking them.
Contact us at news@cartercountytimes.com
