Healthcare Despair

Anybody else hit the despair wall on the health care front? I hadn't until I watched Bill Maher's Friday night in-depth interview of the resplendent Bill Moyers, journalist of journalists. Here's a piece of it on YouTube, if you're curious.

The gentlemen were discussing metaphor and Mr. Maher asked Mr. Moyers for a true metaphor for the unforgiving health care downslide we seem to be choosing. Mr. Moyers, in his genius, answered immediately, "We're all in the same boat." Simple. Clear. Elegant. Moyers said it is "a moral message." It is that, and it's the absolute truth as well.

We are all in the same boat, dear one. Every one of us. What I don't get is why we can't see that or won't see that or don't see that!

Until everyone has health care (and that is health care, not health insurance), none of us really do. Those of us with insurance are already paying for those who don't have health coverage in sky-rocketing costs for tests and procedures we don't need so that insurers can line their own and physicians' pockets.

Don't you get it?! How much plainer does it have to be?

The thing Mr. Moyers said that sent my sweetie and me even more toward the abyss of despair is that "we have two corporate political parties" and "a corporate president." Whoa. Do we? I'm afraid we do. President Obama has already given his word to Big Pharma that he won't allow folks to import less expensive drugs from Canada, and that's just the start of it.

Mr. Moyers: "I think if Obama fought rather than finessed so much ...."

I'm afraid I have to agree with Mr. Moyers. Oh, I like that Obama is cool, don't we all, but is that cool m.o. getting it done? I don't think so. When he gave the eulogy at Senator Edward Kennedy's funeral, there was no mention of the core issue of Senator Kennedy's career: healthcare.

Why? Because Team Obama argued it out and decided that politicizing a cause at the funeral was in poor taste. They're right, it would have been, and it smacks just a little too much of an eye toward reelection to sit well with me. My Jewish grandmother would say: "One mention would have killed him?"

Mr. Moyers says Mr. Obama ought to say, "We need this [universal healthcare] because we're a decent country."

It's shocking to me how the miniscule minority of the right has become the perpetually irritating squeaky wheel that's getting not the grease, but the news cycle. Stop! Enough already!

Bill Maher has been saying for months that Americans don't understand the healthcare debate enough to have an opinion about it. I agree with him, and I count myself among that number. If I had to, I'd even cop to the fact that I don't really want to understand it. I just want it done, so Team Obama can get us out of Iraq, into greening our economy, and a host of other things they promised if we'd elect them. Yes, we did, and so now, yes, they must.

Moyers says toward the end, "We are a very crippled giant, suffering from self-inflicted wounds that if we do not treat and heal will, in fact, bring us to our knees and, ultimately, to our doom."

Despair some? Oh yeah.

"We wait so long. ... We wait a long time, until, almost, the ship has sunk, and the rivets of the ship of state, I think, are in fragile shape right now. ... We're close to losing the moral, financial and economic muscle, and the wisdom that makes a huge nation a great nation, but it's never too late."

Despair much? Yep, but with a glint of hope.

Anne Lamott wrote a swell Op-Ed piece about healthcare and campaign promises to Mr. Obama in the Los Angeles Times recently. She finishes with this:

"Do it for Teddy Kennedy, boss. Do it for the other Kennedys too, for Dr. King, for Big Mama, for the poorest kids you met on the trail, the kids who go to emergency rooms for their health care, do it for their mothers and for Michelle. Just do it.

"Trusting you, Mr. Obama."

I'm with Anne Lamott.

Years ago, I wrote a little book called God's Dictionary, which uses what the reviewers called "folk etymology" to give deeper meanings to everyday words. One of the words in that book was despair. It comes from Latin roots meaning a reversal of hope.

C'mon, Team Obama, get crackin'.

For spiritual nourishment, go to www.susancorso.com.

Follow Dr. Susan Corso on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PeaceCorso

Comments

[vanmungo]

The sad reality is that even WITH the lobbyist-approved, shrunken public option being peddled by the Democrats (in HR3200 or the Senate HELP bill), we will have no reform.

The alarmingly shriveled version of the public option in those bills is nothing like Medicare. Unlike Medicare, it will be self-sustaining, not publicly funded; unlike Medicare, it will charge premiums and impose deductibles, making it unaffordable for the tens of millions most in need of help; unlike Medicare, it will have to negotiate provider fees on the same footing as HMOs--so no cost saving there, no cost savings of the single risk pool of single payer--according to the CBO, no cost savings period.

And no significant expansion of coverage, because it will be open only to those not already covered by employers, and even for them not until 2013! This is a gift to the HMO lobby, pure consumer fraud-- a public option that is neither really public nor an option for most people!

Even Dr. David Scheiner — a single-payer advocate and Obama’s personal physician for 22 years — said, “It’s a bad bill. No bill is better than this bill."

See this article from Physicians for a National Health Plan:

"Bait and Switch: How the Public Option Was Sold"

http://www.pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%E2%80%9Cpublic-option%E2%80%9D-was-sold/

[mamalisa38]

For profit health insurance is immoral. The only way to maximize profits is to raise premiums and deductibles and deny claims. Single payer is the only answer to our health care crisis.

[RightWingMarine]

that's a common misconception of how the insurance industry works.
The premium is set depending on the type of insurance that is being bought and the riskiness of insuring this person. The premiums that are paid are invested in a stable fund such as a GIC that has a low, but steady rate of return. The goal for the insurance company is that enough premiums will be paid and enough interest gained that this amount will be larger than the amount of the bill should the person ever need to use the insurance. Deductibles are a method to lower the cost of the premiums, the lower the premium the less the insurance company can invest and less return they receive and thus the less they have to pay claims. You can get a no deductible plan but the premiums go up correspondingly. Are there some cases of insurance claims being unjustly denied? Of course but there are abuses in any industry.
Insurance companies don't make money by denying claims. If they did then we wouldn't have life insurance, the risk that the insurance company will have to pay out on life insurance is very high as no one lives forever. people buy life insurance on the hopes that they die before they've paid in (taking into account the interest that money would earn) more than their family gets out. The insurance company has the opposite hopes.

[shoabear]

thank you for this article. I also watched the moyers/maher interview and felt that Moyers articulated the truth so well, albeit depressing.

the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. its that simple.

*sigh*

[RightWingMarine]

to make sure I understand you believe that doctors order extra tests for patients that have insurance as a means of lowering the cost imposed by patients that have no insurance? How, exactly, does that work? Does the doctor for the destitute think to themself "Self, I was was going to charge $100 for this procedure but earlier today I ordered pointless x-rays for a different patient with a different problem so now I'll only charge $50."
Now the hospital may use profits generated from the treatment of a patient that has insurance or otherwise pays their bill and use those profits to detract from the cost of treating a destitute patient but extra tests aren't ordered to this end.

[Dem02020]

We're not all in the same boat.

We're in at least three different boats.

There's one boat with people in it who are either ill and presently need health care, or else they're feeling fine and don't need health care at the moment, but they'd like to have a plan in place that in case they do need health care, it won't financially ruin them.

There's another boat that's full of people who provide health care, doctors and nurses and the other staff and even administration you find at the clinic or hospital or doctor's office.

There's a third boat which has a relatively tiny number of people in it, private health insurers, and their boat is between the other two boats, preventing people who need health care from getting in the boat with the people who provide it, unless they pay the health insurers up front first, so that they can slice out all their exorbitant costs and salaries and an obscene profit too...

And that's from the people who don't even need to see a doctor just yet, but just want a plan in place in case they do...

As far as those who are actually in need of health care, well the boat that has health insurers in it, the boat in between the other two boats, blocking the way to health care, they decide who gets health care and who doesn't, and their decision is based upon their own profit, always.

[BarryS]

eventually the insurance companies will price everyone out of their policies and as a deserate, bailout the government will open medicare to all to prevent catastrophe. They will seed their own demise.

[TheIndependenceParty]

They've already done that. Some 70+% of bankruptcies due to medical expenses are those WITH insurance. What use is it, if it can not save you from finacial disaster?

[timbonotes]

Anyone who thought that getting a humane and morally-anchored healthcare system in this country before the beginning of the midterm campaign season was fooling themselves, myself included.

Paul Krugman sums it up very well: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31krugman.html?hp

An effort akin to what was required to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will no doubt be required. I am 60 years old and I remember watching people being hosed down on TV and beaten with billy clubs by redneck sheriffs and civil rights workers and children in churches being murdered by klansmen and their sympathizers. The astroturf freakshow artists and their sympathizers are no better and they are being skillfully manipulated by the megarich corporations and their sociopathic ceos. I'm ready and I have just begun to fight for what's right. Are you?