Up Close and Personal With the U.S. Health Care System

Starting this Tuesday, August 11 and running for a full week, a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical Services and several of its L.A.-area partners, like Operation USA and Tzu Chi Buddhist Foundation are hosting a free health fair at The Forum, 3900 West Manchester Blvd in Inglewood, California.

What's remarkable about this will be the many thousands of L.A.'s unemployed, medically uninsured or under-insured, who will have their eyes examined with prescription eyeglasses made for them on the spot; their teeth cared for (including extractions and even root canals); their kids thoroughly examined; women examined for all manner of women's health issues (including mammograms and pap smears); adults for diabetes, cardiovascular problems, cancer and the like; their lab work and radiology work done free; being given a modest range of medications if prescribed and available on-site; and, even receive acupuncture and chiropractic care. Those treating them will be dozens of L.A.'s best physicians, nurses and other therapists recruited for a week of volunteer community service.

It's worth all of us in or near L.A. dropping by so we can gain a better context for the raging national debate on health care. Of the now-45 million Americans who have no access to routine health care for lack of insurance and the tens of millions more whose insurance coverage borders on farcical for its limits on reimbursement and coverage, this fair will firmly convince anyone with a pulse that we need a radical restructuring of the entire health care system, starting with setting up a single payer, government regulated system. (If you think about it, we already have a single payer system as most insured people have either private or public coverage and providers agree to accept what they are paid through negotiated rates).

It's unlikely a corporatist country like the USA will jump to an exclusively government-run expansion of MediCare for everyone, but most other countries who have similar systems would not change them for the world. The blood libel of calling those countries socialist or accusing them of rationing care ("death panels" as the feckless Sarah Palin describes a government-run system) has to be countered by exposure of the "mute middle" of America to events like the one this week in LA. If they lose their jobs or their small businesses can't pay exorbitant private insurance premiums, they might be lined up at the next health fair in their own neighborhood.

A word about health insurance and President Obama's hopes for a better health care system. He won't get it from the US Congress whose members are thoroughly compromised by health industry money or a distressing willingness to compromise their principles when even a whiff of protest comes into their offices from health insurance lobbyists or other for-profit health care players. Obama needed to have a few strong "single payer" voices at his White House events and he has not done this with any visibility. I know he personally favors single payer but his unwillingness to engage the country he leads is blowing an opportunity which may not come again.

Follow Richard Walden on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Rwalden63

Comments

[mychagal]

Anyone can look up (on youtube) LBJ's speech and others on signing the Civil Rights Act and giving African-Americans the right to vote for the very first time. Though certainly not the same as healthcare reform, but equally complex, his speeches were heartening, and that was an understatement.

His speeches were remarkable, with his Texan drawl and his insistence that we had to make this choice and that there were no other options. He has done and said whatever was needed to get the job done. Cajoling, bullying, yelling, cursing or whatever else he did to get 134 bills pushed through Congress and passed into law, is nothing short of brilliant.

It would be unfair to compare Obama with LBJ. Those were the sixties and far different times than what we have now. But I would tell Obama if he would listen, to please learn from this brilliant man who accomplished so much in the short time he was president. Not even Kennedy, had he lived, got the support from Congress on both sides of the aisle the way LBJ did.. I remember thinking while watching youtube, How could anyone in Congress say no to that?

[pontesisto]

If you would like to help pressure Congress to pass single payer health care please join our voting bloc at:
http://www.votingbloc.org/Health_Bloc.php

[StillIRise]

I agree. President Obama has to fight fire with fire!!!