Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/health/page/12/)
About health and the struggle for universal health care.
The rhetoric of ram and jam to achieve the goal of healthcare legislation mischaracterizes the status of the legislation and legislative alternatives for passing the bill. Further, to make sweeping statements about American public opinion obscures the fact that polls show that people support the particular elements of the bills and support for them goes up when people learn the details.
Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system. In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States. As long as our health care is not about “care” but about profits, there is little chance of arriving at a health care system that will actually serve the needs of Americans. This was the same mistake made by President Clinton in his approach, and it is fast becoming a major reason why Democrats may lose their congressional majority in 2010: people don’t trust a government whose interventions often seem more oriented toward the needs of corporations than the needs of ordinary American citizens, and the only force that is really articulating the resentment people feel at having to pay more and more taxes to fund programs that largely serve corporate power is the anti-government right wing. We need to build a counter-force to that, one which is truly understanding of why people would be opposed to government spending when it is not serving their interests, and the health care plan now being supported by Obama is likely to intensify this right-wing reactionary response to a real problem: the problem of corporate greed and the profit motive distorting medicine and making health about profits not about caring.
The top story at Huffington Post at this moment, is that Harry Reid walked out of a meeting with corporate titans in a huff, because he thought they were telling him to focus on them instead of on small businesses. One line in that story, however, was the big news for me. “At one point, Democrats in the room reached out to the corporate heads for help finishing health care reform and were met with silence.” This is something I just don’t understand! The United States spends twice as much on health care than any other industrialized nation.
Last week I received one of those annoying phone calls, the kind I figure comes from some mega-complex of phone banks, probably from the plains of Nebraska. Because the caller ID showed an area code with which I was unfamiliar, I hesitantly picked up the phone and heard that split second of dead space, letting me know I was going to be solicited for money. I mentally kicked myself for this moment of trust. Imagine my relief when I found myself talking to a woman calling on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), an organization to which I had actually donated money. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to tell her about my frustration with a do-nothing Democratic White House and congress regarding financial industry regulation and true health care reform.
Dr. Rick, as he is known to his patients in Ethiopia, lives his life based on his favorite saying from the Talmud: “Saving one life is like saving an entire world.” For over 20 years, Dr. Rick Hodes has been helping people facing cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, but one of his greatest gifts is helping straighten out people’s spines, going beyond “saving one life” and actually granting his patients new life. I became aware of Dr. Rick after meeting award-winning photo-journalist Mark Tuschman at Synergos, a monthly salon put together by the wonderful people who helped my company with a complete marketing facelift. Mark sent me a link to some of his photographs of Ethiopian Jews, a collection which I found riveting. You can see those pictures by clicking here.
Life is slowly returning to normal after my birthday and my son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is time to turn my mind once again to blogging. I’m going to try something new. For the past year or more, I have been sending brief political analyses out to my New Mexico list serve. I’ve received so much positive feedback about these posts, even from folks who disagree with me, that I’m going to begin publishing them on Tikkun Daily. I am happy to report that I see lights flickering on the health care horizon.
As a small business owner, and one of the millions of people who had individual health coverage instead of a group plan, one of the things I dreaded most was any letter from Blue Cross. Other than my monthly bills, any time I saw their logo on an envelope, I would break out in a sweat. Why? Because every year for over a decade, any letter I got from them was probably telling me that my rates were going up. 10%, 12%, 24% …
I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl. I never watch TV. I don’t subject myself to its violence and idiocy. I get my information by reading, whether on the internet (more and more) or through print media.
A dear friend of mine died. Just before Christmas 2009, she’d learned that she had lung cancer. Back before the DotCom Bust of 2000, she’d had a good job with great benefits, just like me. She lost that job, like countless others, and after a year or so, COBRA ran out. She had a pre-existing condition and even if an insurance company would take her on, the monthly costs would have been staggering.
Every President has to balance two imperatives: defeating his political opponents, and dealing with the problems that the country faces, but only a few Presidents get the opportunity to do both at once. Barack Obama was one of the few, and all of the media attempts to explain why 2008 was not 1932 or 1936 or 1964 or whatever cannot obscure the fact that he failed to rise to the occasion. Without grasping that failure, the significance of his State of the Union Address cannot be understood. When we do grasp it, we see that Obama’s Presidency rests on a carefully drawn contrast in appearance with ill-informed opponents, and on a careful convergence with their actual politics, and not on a program to lead the country in a new direction. This was especially clear in the central theme of his speech last night, deficit reduction.