Speaking of Health Care....
My mother just lost her health benefits. The school district she retired from just voted them away with (though there’s still some argument on this) the cooperation of the teacher’s union who voted for bigger raises instead--too bad, so sad, we’re in a bind so screw you. My sister-in-law says that her retirement health benefits are already gone (she’s not due to retire for twenty years or so). When she retires there will be no health benefits and whether she’ll be able to afford to retire at sixty-five is a big open question right now. In a suburb west of Des Moines, Iowa, the city council has voted not to pay half the health insurance for early retirees, something they had been doing. ‘This will double my payments,’ says one woman. Double them, she says, to $16,000 a year. Sixteen thousand dollars a year. For health benefits. The mind boggles, actually, at $8,000 a year which she was already paying to cover half of her health benefits. She’ll have to go back to work, she says. But who on earth earns enough even working full-time to cover $16,000 a year in health benefits?
Every budget, every year--you can have a raise, three percent, let’s say, but insurance costs are up, you’ll have to pay some of that too. And that’s not to mention all the people who have nothing. Twenty-three thousand dollars for routine angioplasty. Ten thousand dollars for a broken ankle. Don’t lose your job. Don’t take a risk. Never, ever think about trying to go out on your own with that great business idea you had.
Medical care and health insurance are a genuine four-fold crisis in this country. We say we’re a land of opportunity, that creativity and genius can give anyone the American dream. But the strain of health care, of providing for yourself and your spouse and your children and parents keeps us blocked and stymied and stressed and docile so corporations and other large organizations can buy us cheap, steal our ideas, and give us nothing by a tiny, momentary respite from our fears.
Hillary Clinton was right. We need health care reform. And I hope the people who blocked it and shut off the discussion and the chance to figure something out that’s better than what we’ve got are proud of themselves. I believe that the lack of health care reform impacts our democracy and our freedom. Personally, I think we need a single-payer system. Would it be perfect? No. Would it be better than what we’ve got? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
We were told a lot of things that weren’t true the last time health care and insurance reform came up. We were told it in shrill voices with anxiety-provoking music in the background. And we were told it because profits were at stake not because any of the people telling us really cared whether you or I could get health care when we needed it or could raise our voices without fear.
As someone said to me quite recently--a guarantee of profit in the past is not a promise of profit in the future. It’s not the function of a democracy to guarantee that profit, especially that of one company at the expense of another. And even more at the expense of its citizens. In the movie, Hoosiers, the mother of Barbara Hershey’s character says to the basketball coach--the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day. It ought not shine on the same company every day either. And you can say that letting companies fail also hurts citizens. And that’s so. We must pay attention to that too. But we can’t let ourselves protect hard-working-people-with-money at the expense of hard-working-people-with-nothing. It’s nice to think that people with nothing are used to nothing and therefore won’t mind being stepped on by the people with money who, after all, are accustomed to more. But it’s wrong. Change for simple redistribution of wealth is not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about is not refusing to change just to prevent a redistribution of wealth.
So we don’t--or shouldn’t, at least--decide the changes to health care because insurance companies want to stay in business or want to continue to make x-level of profits. We decide what makes us better people, community and country. What makes us safe, healthy and free to pursue our lives without the huge cost of health care hanging over our heads like a giant hammer set to swing. We recognize that there is a great task here that needs doing and we enter into that task with open minds, straight un-spun talk, and a minimum of scary music.