Those Who Wait
The Health Care Mess
Hopping For Hope
Hobbling around my house, I was deeply saddened for those people and by
those people. To me, they were, in the end, simply ridiculous.
Marionettes being tugged around on strings by big pharma and the
conservative right. I saw those red faces, those puffed cheeks, the
veins popping, the blood boiling. And I paused and prayed for our
president because, by deliberately stoking the flames of racism—and make
absolutely no mistake, that’s the subtext of most of this fake anger—the
GOP has unleashed something much uglier, and made the country
considerably less safe for our president.
But I suspect they already knew that.
Who would Jesus insure? I don’t pretend to know any more about the
health care mess than the people yelling, but I do know something about
the people waiting. It’s reasonable to assume the people waiting are, in
the aggregate, in much greater pain than the people yelling. Whichever
of the two you are, I think there should be a consensus that, at least
in terms of what gets broadcast on TV, there seems to be an egregious
lack of compassion on the part of those doing the yelling. It’s all fear
and paranoia about a health care plan that’s not even written, let alone
signed by the president. But if you’ve ever been in pain—in
fall-down-and-cry, wish-you-were-dead pain, pain too difficult to even
describe with any real clarity—and if you, in your pain, had no access
to even modest health care, you might well be one of the silent majority
who don’t go to those town hall meetings. Perhaps because you have to
work. Perhaps because you don’t have a car. But I don’t see a lot of
those who wait at these shouting matches, and the few I do see are
shouted down by those doing the yelling, people paranoid that the
president is going to take away what they’ve got.
What they’ve got is a dysfunctional health care system that behaves a
lot like a temperamental Doberman. Tuesday he’s your best friend,
Thursday he bites you. Those doing the yelling don’t seem to know or
realize health care premiums in this country have doubled over the past
ten years. The economic crisis has cost millions of jobs, and many of
those people have lost their health care and are now losing their
unemployment. Millions of those doing the yelling are at risk for losing
their health care or for seeing their premiums skyrocket—and losing
their health care. The system is broken, has been broken for years, and
is a major cause of our economic woes, both because of those doing the
yelling and those doing the waiting—who get sicker and thus cost us
more.
A great many of those doing the yelling claim to know Jesus. Michele
Bachmann last week proposed a “blood covenant” by which we Christians
would agree to “slit our wrists” should Obamacare pass into law. There
was not a single voice from either the “moral” Christian right or the
African American church to challenge her. And my suspicion is, not one
black pastor in town has much idea who Michele Bachmann is. The black
church, as usual, as it has been for decades, is mute and ignorant on
the most important public debate to rage in years. Where are we?
Where’s our voice? That’s what’s so utterly disturbing about these
phony “town hall” meetings, not that we were excluded, but that we
don’t care. Your pastor is not talking about this, your church is
not circulating information and educating your community about this.
I’m not sure how a brazen demonstration of vitriol and thinly-disguised
racism honors Christ or in any way glorifies Him. Where is the lesson of
Matthew 25: For I was hungry, and you gave Me
something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I
was a stranger, and you invited Me in… (NAS)
2014: Still Waiting
Despite the clumsy rollout of the Affordable Care Act, there are still
people waiting. There may actually now be even more people waiting, as
some doctors, once sympathetic to the uninsured, become increasingly
less patient with those without medical insurance. The feeling is there
really is no excuse now. Sign up for the ACA. If your can’t afford it,
apply for Medicare. Only, it’s really not that simple. Some of us don’t
understand what “open enrollment” is because we’ve *never* had health
insurance, ever. Why can’t we just sign up now, in July or august?
Despite the hype and all the arguing, there are still likely millions
who don’t really understand what the ACA is or how to sign up for it.
There are those who have signed up who can’t make their premiums and are
being dropped. And there are those afraid to sign up because of the
ACA’s linkage to the IRS.
Insisting the ACA sign-up process be tied into the IRS was yet another
political maneuver on the part of Republican obstructionists. There are
entire classes of people who won’t even apply for the ACA because of its
hard-wire connection to the IRS: people with questionable immigration
status, people who owe child support or back taxes, people with criminal
warrants, even people delinquent on student loans all have some level of
fear—whether warranted or not—that signing up for the ACA will send a
red flag downtown because of the process’s divergent IRS records lookup.
Republicans claim their demand for this linkage is a safeguard against
fraud. It is not. It is intended to and surely has lowered the sign-up
numbers, which is the true reason for the linkage.
So we’re still waiting. I have to imagine things will improve in the
second year and the third and the sixth and ninth and the day will
ultimately come when affordable healthcare in this nation will simply be
part of the national scenery, like Medicare and Social Security. We
actually have to be reminded that Republicans fought just as hard
against Lyndon’s John’s own “Obamacare,” which we now call Medicare.
Right-wing extremists call our president Hitler and demand the
government take its hands off of their healthcare while steadfastly
clinging to Medicare, which is precisely and by definition Socialized
medicine. It’s all so very confusing, and all so very political.
Some of the screaming has died down, though hardline Republicans are
still trying to campaign on “repeal and replace” for the ACA, though
they never once say precisely what they would replace it with. The
American people are either war-weary or have smartened up to the point
where just kicking Barack Obama in the shins is no longer good enough.
These people need to put some actual alternative ideas on the table,
otherwise it’s all hot air. Republicans have in large measure moved on
to their endless waste of money and bandwidth over the tragedy in
Benghazi, Libya in an effort to stall Hillary Clinton’s all-but-certain
presidential campaign, but they’ve even blown it with that strategy. The
American people have an extremely short attention span. Eight
Congressional inquiries later, we’re just tired of hearing about
Benghazi. Even the most wildly naïve voter knows, for certain, the
latest waste of millions of dollars on the latest Benghazi witch hunt is
purely political. The Republicans are over-playing their hand and losing
the mainstream voter with these re-runs.
The Affordable Care Act is now free-flowing through the American
bloodstream. I suspect when open enrollment comes around again this
fall, with a hopefully more efficient website and better information
saturation, the enrollment numbers are poised to soar, which would make
an ACA-based GOP strategy a real gamble for the upcoming midterms. The
conventional wisdom is the democrats will die in a bloodbath in
November, largely as a result of the ACA’s terrible rollout and the
president’s overwhelming unpopularity among those who show up. Those too
lazy or too uninformed to show up, better known as Obama supporters,
will not show up, no matter what this president does. The young,
minorities, liberals just fall into a coma during the mid-terms, not
realizing or not caring that voting for the president is not enough: you
have to vote in rational people whom he can work with. This they will
not do. The overwhelming majority of voters this election day will be
older, whiter and more conservative. The common factor between that
group and the group the president actually needs to show up is neither
group fully understands the ACA but just like it or hate it based solely
upon whether they like or hate the president. Based on that, it seems
obvious the Democrats will get slaughtered.
But, wait, something’s going on. Maybe not enough to get Obama’s legions
off the sofa, but, I imagine by November, drumming up fervor over the
ACA will require a huge investment, and the entire nation will be sick
to death of hearing the name “Benghazi.” From my desk, at this writing,
November still looks like a DNC bloodbath. But hope abounds that the
GOP’s most likely 2014 strategy is crumbling beneath its feet.
Those Who STILL Wait: Most of us won't even bother going to the hospital.
Excluded
When Congress passed Social Security in 1935 the opposition called it,
“The lash of the dictator.” Two-thirds of African Americans in the labor
force were excluded from receiving benefits because they were considered
“intermittent workers.” When President Lyndon Johnson added Medicare to
the social Security Act in 1965 there was stiff and angry opposition,
George H.W. Bush calling it, “socialized medicine.” The truth is, no
good idea ever made it into law without running a gantlet of uninspired
political cowards. Likewise, no effective federal program has ever been
implemented without encountering severe problems during its inaugural
years.
Even so, it is more likely than not that, unless a Republican wave
captures the 2016 elections, the ACA will ultimately become settled law.
Future generations will embrace the program as a logical, reasonable,
and invaluable part of American society. This terrified Republicans for
reasons I cannot articulate, since the ACA was built around private
business and not government administration. When you hear someone
calling the ACA a federal takeover of healthcare, they are lying to you.
more often than not, they know, for a fact, that they are lying and
choose to lie anyway. The ACA works through corporate giant insurers and
is pushing millions of new customers their way. The government doesn't
tell you what doctor you can have, doesn't have "Death Panels," despite
Sarah Palin--a professed "Christian"--continuing to knowingly lie about
that.
Eventually, most of the yelling will stop. A lot of it already has. But
there are still those who are waiting, who will continue to wait,
because their personal or financial situation is not perfect. The ACA is
designed to provide assistance to underserved people whose papers are in
order. There is, to my knowledge, no government assistance available to
those who need to get those disparate parts of their life in order.
Those people will continue to be denied until they have a pristine set
of records and/or corrected legal status. Between now and then, the
waiting goes on.
Christopher J. Priest
6 September 2009 Original
10 June 2014 Updated
editor@praisenet.org
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