President Obama summed up the health care debate best on Friday when he told the throng at George Mason University: "It's a debate about the character of our country -- about whether we can still meet the challenges of our time, whether we still have the guts and courage to give every citizen, not just some, the chance to reach their dreams."
No other industrialized nation in the world denies its citizens universal health care. That ours still does is a moral affront to everything we stand for. How can we say we offer equality of opportunity when those who work the hardest have the least medical coverage?
During the past year, we've heard many dramatic and heart-wrenching stories. But to find out just how close these stories hit to home, play a round of Six Degrees of the Uninsured. Ask the people in your circle of frequent contact if they have health insurance. It probably won't take long for you to find several who don't, and their stories just might churn your stomach.
Jan, the woman who administered my dental plan's office, was uninsured. So as she helped me get the dental care I needed, she was at risk from all the infectious diseases that came across her desk every day. And I was at risk of getting them from her because she couldn't afford to seek treatment promptly. When I asked her how she lived with such insecurity she said: "I pray and take my vitamins." Then she got fired for refusing to spy on her fellow workers.
My cousin Renee, who works as a legal secretary, is now uninsured, along with her husband and 8 year-old-son, although other jobs have covered her in the past. Trained as a paralegal, even she could not figure out the forms that would supposedly enroll her son for a federally supported children's policy. With a worsening economy, she had to take a lower-paid job that did not include health insurance. When she was hired, her employer said, "Surely you have health insurance through your husband." She was afraid she would lose the job if she told the truth: her husband's work was unstable and seldom included insurance. She was the family breadwinner for now.
Robin, the woman who takes care of my disabled mother, has no health insurance. She works for a private company that contracts with Medicaid to offer in-home care of patients who might otherwise be forced into nursing homes. Without Robin's help, my mother would have to leave her home of 50 years or -- even worse in her opinion -- be forced to live with me. Robin has a severely disabled daughter herself, who receives medical care through Medicaid. But Robin has no coverage. So when Robin is up all night with her daughter's seizures, and her stressed immune system is overwhelmed, anything she catches goes right back home to her daughter or to my mother. Every day she can't afford to go to the doctor is another day of risk for those who can.
We Americans who have the great good fortune to be insured through a job or a loved one also have a moral obligation to help those who don't. The folks who are uninsured in today's America have jobs and families but no access to affordable health care. They contribute every day to our economy and pay taxes that fund health care for the elderly, disabled, and the poor. Such Americans should not be kicked to the curb when they themselves are sick or unable to find work. As the saying goes, there but for the grace of God go I. But sometimes it is easier to look away than to face our own vulnerability.
We've been told in the health care debate that the richest nation on the earth (even during a global recession) can't afford to offer health care for all its citizens. What happened to the famous American can-do spirit that saved Europe from dictators during a global depression? Surely we can figure out an efficient way to provide health care at a reasonable cost. We can do it through a federally subsidized program that uses private insurers, as in Germany, or a single-payer system as in Canada. What we cannot do is continue to avert our eyes and pretend we don't see the consequences that so many of our fellow Americans must face every day.
There but for the grace of God go I.
Follow Linda R. Monk, J.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LindaRMonkJD
If the government forces anyone to buy a service from a private company, that's un-Constitutional.
Mandatory insurance on your vehicle is borderline and would be un-Constitutional if there was a way to prove that 'driving your car' is vital for life itself.
However there is no 'priviledge' in the 'pursuit of life, liberty and freedom', it's a right...and a right that anyone one in this country is free to excercise their decision to say so 'no' private health insurance.
People in this country are not chattle where regulations say they must take certain anti-biotics or in this case, buy insurance from private HMOs.
Single-payer is Constitutional, not this bill.
What they are saying is that our nation cannot afford to take care of all of our old and sick members.
I guess they are telling us that America isn't so great after all.
But there's too much money involved, too much profit to be loss if reform is passed. I'am talking about single payer. This bill today is a insurance give away and will enrich them. But the fight for single payer will not stop. Single payer is the most cost effective system to date hands down. States will carry on to enact single payer.
Countries that have universal health have healthier employees and are more productive. Businesses have lower overhead how can the US complete against that?
Any politician foolish enough to have this opinion may find himself unemployed.
I am in personal disbelief that the left is so eager for this particular bill, so much so that people are actually comparing it to Social Security and Medicare... even Civil Rights. Please! everything that resembles SS, MC and CR has been gutted from this legislation.
It seems to me that the left that supports this bill cares more for their party keeping their jobs than they do for providing for the citizens of this country...Left meet Right, your mirror image.
Grayson's bill to grant access to Medicare for all deserves nothing less than for all of us to shout from the rafters. We want Medicare For All, and we want it now! No more discussion about some moral imperative. Where are the lawyers when you need them. Sue the you-know-whats, and do it now!
"Worse, why do our elected representatives continue to enjoy Single Payer health care at the expense of those they refuse to allow the right to health care?"
There's the problem right there. The fact that those that would stand up for a system responsible for thousands of us dying...continue to get voted in by the people.
We need to carefully evaluate our own Congressperson and Senator. Then seek out Single Payer candidates. If our Congress sucks, it's OUR fault. Until we accept that, we cannot change it.
And if something isn't done, we'll have less and less to say about it.
America has not a crumb of civility for its own people. Being away for so many years, I had forgotten that simple truth.
http://theverges.blogspot.com/2010/03/maybe-they-are-actually-right.html
My compliments to your exquisitely written article.
You falsely assume that this is a matter of well-intentioned Democrats struggling against some deep-seated opposition to single payer among amorphous forces in the general populace.
A decisive majority of the American physicians and citizens have long favored single payer Medicare for all, according to poll after poll. That's not the roadblock. See the following:
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/12/09/two-thirds-support-3/
The roadblock is that the Democrats are owned by the health lobby. The Congressional Dems raked in $90 million from the health lobby in 2008, vs. $76 million for the Republicans--both parties are locked up by Big Insurance and Big Pharma. Obama took $19 million from the same quarter, more than all the other presidential candidates combined.
Therefore, your gradualist analogy does not hold. This is a matter of breaking the chokehold of a minority special interest--the health lobby. This can be done at a legislative stroke. Medicare was enacted all at once and implemented fully for 20 percent of the populace in nine months before computers were in widespread use.
Slavery was ended on the federal level pretty much all at once. Women's right to vote enacted all at once. And so on. The only reason that people in Congress want to "go slow" is because their pockets are stuffed with health lobby cash. This is a problem in both parties.
We therefore need an independent progressive party , not more temporizing with the corporate malefactors.
The same was true for women's rights. The NJ Constitution allows "persons" with property to vote, and woman and free blacks exercise that right until 1806, when NJ changes its constitution. The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 asserts women's right to suffrage; then western states like Wyoming were the first to explicitly allow women to vote, then the first woman is elected to Congress from Montana (Jeannette Rankin). Then the 19th Amendment is ratified, giving women the right to vote NATIONWIDE. So at least 113 years on that one!! The only way women were protected from job discrimination is because opponents of the civil rights law thought adding women would DEFEAT the bill.
Ideological purity is great, but it's not American history.
Again--I was talking about the women's right to vote in federal elections, because we're talking about FEDERAL law with the health-care bill. That was accomplished at one stroke with the Nineteenth Admendment.
The major victories in federal labor law during the thirties were also accomplished in bold strokes in the form of the Wagner Act.
And I noticed that you managed to ignore the fact that Medicare was passed all at once in 1965 and fully implemented for 20 percent of the population. In Taiwan a single payer system was implemented for the entire nation almost immediately.
OF COURSE were long histories of mass struggle leading to these victories, but they were not attained, finally, by mincing, timorous compromise at every step by people who did nothing but connive with bought-off establishment politicians. There were decades of mass struggle--demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience, strikes, and, in the case of slavery, a bloody civil war, in case you didn't notice. These people struggled militantly--they didn't settle for decorous currying of favor with this or that elite. They forced the hand of the elite by independent mass action in case after case.
There is no ideological purity at work in my comments. It's the opposite--there is an ideological dogma at work in the health-care bill: it's called neoliberal market fundamentalism. No other advanced country is wedded to it in the extreme manner of the United States.
In counterposing a nonprofit system to the corporate peonage of individual mandates without sitringent price or coverage regulation, Iam proposing a PROVEN, PRACTICAL system that has been at work for fifty years in the rest of the industrialized world, which achieves better health outcomes than the USA with universal coverage and at half the per capita cost. This is why WHO rates the US system 37th in the world and dead last among industrialized nations.
This Rube Goldberg contraption of corporate free-for-all--reinforced by the current bill--an only devolve into further dysfunction and chaos. It is a step backward because it strengthens the corporate forces that have brought us to this pass. In fact, this bill is nearly the same as the version offered by AHIP in 2009.
The Washington agents of the health lobby in both parties cannot consider what's practical and workable, because that solutions would wipe out their paymasters, the dysfunctional middlemen.
That's a triumph of venality and dogmatism over common sense and proven, practical solutions.
Is this what you're celebrating?