I support your efforts to reform health care. Please keep pushing. And please avoid watering down reforms to the point of making them irrelevant.
A country rich enough to kill Taliban with drone missiles in Afghanistan can deliver breast cancer treatment to an unemployed administrative assistant in Texas! It is time for America to set its skewed priorities straight.
I believe the discourse around health care reform should be a conversation about the right of every American to a basic level of care. Denying health care is a denial of civil rights. We accept the right of every child to attend school. And we pay for her education, even if her parents are in the country illegally, because all Americans have a stake in equipping the next generation to be productive members of society. It is the next logical step to apply that sense of shared responsibility to health care.
And please keep repeating the fact that health-care costs have skyrocketed at the same time that real wages have stagnated. Even if people will not support reform because it is right, they will do it out of self-interest, when they know the facts.
Our current system discriminates against people who make too much to qualify for government care, but don't make enough to pay for the basics of wellness, like preventive check-ups and routine tests. For them, serious illness compounds physical and emotional crisis with a financial setback they may never escape. Multiplied millions of times, their illnesses are creating a financial hole the U.S. may never climb out of. And may God help the growing numbers of the unemployed. There is a stark line segregating the health care haves from the have nots.
This is not the America we should be.
As the health reform debate festers into an increasingly acrimonious and unhelpful mess, "Astroturf" organizations are disrupting town hall meetings and spewing misinformation. This disturbing perversion of the town hall process should cause thoughtful Americans to recoil in distaste. And to take action. That is why I am finally writing today, after having these sentiments for months.
But I am hopeful intimidation tactics will backfire. Perhaps by embarrassing moderate opponents, fake Americans for Prosperity will tip the balance toward reform. Fistfights at a Tampa town hall, hand-lettered signs scrawled with swastikas, and a Congressman hung in effigy, recall scenes of angry, axe-wielding white men screaming at a little black girl trying to enter a desegregated school. That was not the America we wanted to be then. I am hopeful America can rise to the occasion again. We are better than this.
My qualifications to write this essay: None, really. But I have seen a dear friend lose health insurance half-way though breast cancer treatment and before reconstructive surgery. This upper middle-class professional's company declared bankruptcy and cancelled its policy, leaving her to come up with $11,000 per treatment to continue chemo. If she couldn't find a new job soon enough, her cancer would be considered a pre-existing condition and not be covered by a new employer's policy. All this was perfectly legal.
2 comments:
Fully agree with everything you say here. I find healthcare to be a logical extension our our "unalienable rights", the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government defends our right to liberty through the US military establishment, and we have a multitude of government institutions that support of pursuit of happiness (national parks, interstate highway system, arts endowments, etc), but what of that first, and arguably most important right...the basic right to life itself? Reasonably affordable healthcare for all Americans MUST be a part of this package of fundamental rights.
Now if I could just get this through the thick skulls of my hopelessly lost, neo-con friends! :-)
I hope that Obama is still strong enough personally and politically to rise to the occasion and persuade us to do the right thing. Healthcare opponents have weakened him considerably, however, and by delaying a vote to get to the summer recess they now have further opportunity to spread their toxic nihilism.
I think two aspects of our American reality are at work in raising opposition to healthcare reform. First there is the deplorable state of K-12 education and the mass ignorance this leaves us with. The poorly educated are susceptible to lies and specious arguments and are generally not capable of seeing things from any perspective other than their own narrowest short-term self-interest.
The second aspect is that there really is not a sense among all Americans that we are one people. We remain divided, first by race, then by region, then by class. Among white Americans, at least, there is still, I think, a lot of resentment at the prospect of folks perceived to be of a different group (not real Americans in Palinese)receiving a benefit. Too many middleclass whites are happy to accept benefits to which they feel entitled (but which they may not even acknowledge as benefits, like the deductability of mortgage interest), while rejecting the idea that members of other groups are entitled to anything. It's so easy to become fearful and angry at the prospect of benefits going to the unaccommodated whom we see as also unentitled and unworthy.
We have been flattered and lied to by our politicians so persistently for so many years that we are no longer able to listen to criticism and accept it as true. Too many minds are closed against recognizing any of the realities of this country -- the uninsured, violence against women, our huge prison population, radically unequal distribution of wealth, etc., etc., -- that undermine the endlessly repeated notion that America is the best nation in the world. This is partly a failure of leadership. But with the memory of Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter still alive in our political culture, what politician is going to tell us that we aren't the greatest? Even Al Franken will have a hard time delivering that message.
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