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HEALTH CARE HYPOCRITES; HEALTH CARE LIARS
02/27/2010
I’ve read and written a lot about the health care debate, and watched all seven hours of the summit this past Thursday, and the two things everyone could agree on were the statements by Senator Tom Coburn and President Obama. Tom Coburn said the United States is a big country while President Obama said health care reform is complicated. After that, there was little agreement.
On the surface, of course, there was some overlap. The Democrats have put many Republican ideas in their two health reform bills, and everyone agrees that there must be cost containment and cuts in fraud and abuse in public programs. But two big problems make any substantive agreement impossible. One concerns ideology and the other political strategy.
Democrats and Republicans simply don't agree on whether or not health care is a right or a privilege. Democrats believe everyone in this country has a right to some basic health care, the right to be treated for illness, the right to see a doctor, the right to vaccinations, prevention of treatable diseases, and the security of knowing one’s child will not die for lack of medical care. They also believe that the wealthy ought to contribute, through taxes or fees, in some way to a pool that assists the poor and the elderly in gaining access to that care. They believe in the strong helping the weak, the rich helping the poor, and the young helping the old so that our society does not leave anyone behind, helpless and dying.
It’s a simple idea, really, that everyone – by virtue of their humanity and membership in this society – has the right to be healthy, and that no one, because of lack of resources, ought to be left to die unnecessarily. Yet the Republicans do not share this belief. They believe health care is a privilege, something one gains access to only if one has sufficient income, or a job with good benefits. They say they believe in Medicare (which is not welfare, but a system to which workers contribute a portion of their income) but some of them are running in 2010 on a promise to end Medicare, so obviously they don’t. How our elderly citizens on fixed incomes would survive in a system where they had to pay sky-high insurance premiums I don’t know. There isn’t an elderly person alive today who doesn’t have some pre-existing condition, and denying them Medicare will doom them to premature deaths. Good-bye grandma!
Republicans know that calling health care a privilege sounds callous and heartless, so they've changed the language, a la Frank Luntz who provides their talking points, and begun calling it a “responsibility.” How health care is a responsibility, I don’t know. I guess eating right and exercising could be called responsibilities, and I agree everyone ought to try to do those things, but there are two problems with that kind of thinking.
First, eating right is both difficult and expensive in our country. We (and our children) are bombarded each day by messages to eat products that are bad for us: fast food with high fat content, cereals and snacks loaded with high fructose corn syrup, animal protein laden with cholesterol, etc. etc. It's difficult today to know, and even more difficulty to afford, what's good for you, what will keep you healthy and what won’t harden your arteries. The things that are most healthy – fresh fruits and vegetables – have become more and more expensive, while the cheapest foods are full of sugar and fat. In inner city neighborhoods, the stores at which the poor must shop dont' even carry fresh food. Republican talkers who don’t deserve naming, make fun of the poor and wonder how bad off they can be if they are fat. Yet any dietician will tell you that cheap foods are full of empty calories that lead to obesity, while nutritious healthy food are extremely expensive and unattainable for some families.
There’s another problem with this thinking, and here I return to my family’s recent tragedy. My parents were two of the healthiest people I knew in terms of exercise and eating correctly. They watched their weight, ate plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, kept away from foods with empty calories, and exercised religiously. They were responsible, yet they developed catastrophic diseases – through no fault of their own - that cost a great deal of money to treat. My mother had leukemia and my father a progressive neurological disease that left him completely disabled. As readers of this column know, they died within four days of each other. My father’s doctor bills were low, as there was no real treatment for his disease, but my mother’s treatment was expensive. From the day she was diagnosed, she knew she wouldn’t recover, but she wanted to live as long as she could to continue caring for my dad. So Medicare, and an expensive supplemental policy, paid for two experimental treatments and numerous blood transfusions to keep her alive and surprisingly strong. That medical care allowed her to outlive her husband by four days. Yes, the care was costly, though I’ve looked at her Medicare statements, and Medicare discounts medical bills by a great amount, so it was not as costly as you might think. However, Mom actually saved the state a lot of money by continuing to care for Dad at home. Had he gone into a nursing home, Medicaid would have picked up the tab and his care would have cost us all a lot more. So her Medicare was a bargain for the taxpayers.
And my question to Republicans and those who consider health care a responsibility is this: What do you do for children who are born with disabilities, or develop type 1 diabetes (that has nothing to do with obesity), or contract meningitis or a staph infection? What do you do when a sixteen year old gets lymphoma, as my brother did, or a thirty year old gets an infection in the hospital, one that almost kills her, as my daughter did? What do you do when there’s an earthquake or a hurricane, and thousands of people are injured? I know, I know. Some of you are saying “It’s not that people should be responsible for their own health, it’s that people should be responsible for their own health insurance.” To which I reply, what about those who have been laid off and cannot afford COBRA, or who can’t find a job and so cannot afford even the most catastrophic coverage? What about those with pre-existing conditions? The argument falls short. It makes no sense. It's cold and heartless.
The second reason why Republicans and Democrats will never agree on health care, regardless of how sincere Tom Coburn and Lamar Alexander may have seemed in saying they wanted to work with Democrats, is that they made clear months ago that they wanted health insurance reform to be Barack Obama’s “Waterloo.” They say they want him to fail, which means they want the country to fail, but then they have never cared about the people succeeding. They want corporations and the wealthy to succeed. They don’t care one whit about the poor, the lower middle class, the middle class, the sick, the minorities, the children or the elderly. Their voting record shows this. So they use all kinds of words – all false and misleading – to characterize the Democrats’ attempt to reform health care. They speak of death panels and socialized medicine, socialism and communism, government takeover and bankrupting the country. They have no intention of working with Obama and the Democrats. Their united cry to scrap the system and start over is simply their clever way of killing any reform.
Additionally, their tantrums in response to an up or down vote in the Senate are ludicrous, head spinning actually. They say it would be undemocratic to let the majority rule. (Since when is "minority rule" democratic?) A simple majority shouldn’t be used to pass bills concerning such a large portion of our budget, Republicans say, yet they used the same procedure to pass huge tax cuts which represented an enormous slice of our budget. And they did it twice.
I don’t claim to know the absolute best approach to reforming health insurance and assuring health care for all, but I believe it's a goal worth pursuing. I even believe Republicans have some good ideas. But the problem is that Republicans don’t want to implement any real reform. They're not interested in covering the uninsured. They believe the uninsured are responsible for their own plight and should not be helped. Period. And beyond that, they know health insurance reform would be a huge victory for the Democrats and Obama, and they are determined to prevent that.
Republicans are simply hypocrites and liars when it comes to health care reform. They can’t be trusted. So it’s up to the Democrats, and no matter what it costs them in November, I hope they put the people first and pass reform. Because it’s certain the Republicans won’t put the people first, at least not any people that make less than a million dollars a year.
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