Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/health/page/5/)
About health and the struggle for universal health care.
You may not have caught this news: “L.A. had fewer crimes last year than it did in 1957 – the mayor calls the numbers ‘mind-boggling’.”
But we all know that: “Los Angeles – like other big cities around the country – is in the midst of a crime drop so steep and profound, it has experts scratching their heads.”
Medical insurers around the country are announcing a new round of double-digit premium
increases, belying the promise that Obamacare would reduce costs of health care. Although the
“Affordable” Health Care Act is not yet fully implemented, it is reasonable to assume that the
further expansion of benefits will dwarf the promised savings as detailed in the error-filled CBO
report Democrats use to justify the claim.
I do think that the best cure for the paralyzing helplessness that can follow reading the news, a despair I have been prone to at times throughout my life, is not so much reading the good news, as getting stuck into work that helps people.
Still, the good news can help. So maybe the ship is going down. But in the long run, we’re all dead, the planet fries and the sun explodes. And today, it helps me to concentrate on the work I can do, to recall how despairing I was about the world population explosion, global poverty and child mortality forty years ago, and then to realize how much has improved, due to the work of people who didn’t allow despair to paralyze them.
On Wednesday, January 9, nearly 2,000 people rallied against fracking outside of Governor Cuomo’s State of the State Address, in Albany, New York.
From Alice Miller, and from many other sources, I have come to accept without any doubt that no one does violence to others without violence having been done to them earlier. From James Gilligan, whose work I have mentioned here before (e.g. here and here), I have come to understand the mechanism that translates violence received into violence enacted on others. From Marshall Rosenberg and my years of working with Nonviolent Communication, I now have a clear frame for making sense of the work of Miller, Gilligan and others. The language of human needs helps me understand violence with an open heart, without collapsing, without blaming, without shaming.
Dear President Obama and Democratic Members of Congress,
I invite you to embrace the radical notion that there are fundamental truths and values that the vast majority of US citizens believe in and support. They have chosen you to be the messenger and implementer of those ideas in the form of legislation and actions on a federal level. Now is the time for you to step out of a politics based on fear and limiting beliefs and into the very real possibility and actuality that when you choose to stand in a politics of love, your actions will be celebrated. This is what a politics of love looks like:
1. Genuine care for the well-being of all, both in the US and abroad.
For many hours every day for more than two of the last three weeks, I was in a hospital setting, supporting my beloved sister’s recovery from a major surgery. I have a lot of very personal experiences – of sorrow, helplessness, and moments of grace – that are now part of who I will forever be. This piece is about what I learned from all of this about why so many of us hate being in hospitals and what it would take to create hospitals that are truly designed to support healing. Despite everything that I am about to say, I am confident that all of us who were with my sister during this time would rate the care we received as excellent. We were in a hospital ranked in the top 5% in the US.
Two powerful op-ed pieces in today’s New York Times helps me to clarify my disquiet with the Obama presidency.
On Wednesday October 10th, in a conversation with the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney said “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” Sit with that quote a minute and think. Really? Beyond knowing in your gut that we do, in fact, have people who die in their apartments, homes, backyards, on the streets, in shelters, at soup kitchens, and in all sorts of places, in part, because they don’t have access to adequate health care, Mitt Romney is missing other parts of the nightmare that is, for 50 million Americans, the reality of not having health insurance. I’ve written about my friend Anna before, and I will keep writing about her, until and maybe even after we get health care in this country right.
Eighteen years ago, a year after my mother’s death, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin’s Disease. When my mother passed, she had lymphoma. Five years prior to my diagnosis, my Dad died, after a long battle with Melanoma. It metastasized to his brain. All that cancer so close to home was my wake up call. I knew something was wrong, and I knew it couldn’t just be genetics.