Opinion: Dying for change we can believe in
By Greg ZemanStaff Writer
Imagine if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had included an “opt out” clause.
Unless you’re a California same-sex couple looking to adopt a child, then you don’t really have to imagine that at all, do you?
Everybody else though, imagine you were denied health insurance or just couldn’t afford it. Oh wait — the democrat-controlled congress just passed a health care reform policy that includes a public health insurance option for uninsured sick people like you. Hooray! Too bad your scum-bag, republican governor “opted out” of that insurance option.
A provision being “seriously considered” by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other democrats would allow such a scenario to play out: Your state could decide not to participate in the public option.
Then say you have to go to the emergency room.
If you’ve never spent eight hours being blinded by the reflection of fluorescent light bouncing off of shiny linoleum floors; if you’ve never sat in a suffocatingly crowded room full of urine-soaked transients with loud, productive whooping coughs; if you’ve never stooped to wishing that one of the moaning people bleeding to death all around you would just shut up and finish dying so you could steal their ticket number and actually, kind of, sort of, maybe receive medical attention, then you don’t really understand the reality of many Americans without health insurance.
If you have experienced this situation, you can thank both parties for it.
Forty-eight million Americans have no health insurance. That means 48 million human beings, many of them children with absolutely no choice in the matter, have to live with decisions made by status quo-advocating, obstructionist politicians. It means those children have to go to the ER when they need basic medical attention, attention that the most powerful nation in the world should be ready and able to provide.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont, is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee charged with creating a health care reform bill. He has openly stated that the public option, which would control care costs in the same manner as Medicare, was just a “bargaining chip” to secure votes. The Democrats have a super majority — who exactly do they need to bargain with?
Maybe Baucus’ Chief Health Adviser Elizabeth Fowler, vice president of public policy for insurance behemoth WellPoint from 2006 to 2008, knows something about the senator’s inability to grasp the importance of a public option.
If you can’t get a hold of her, maybe Baucus’ previous chief health adviser Michelle Easton knows. You can reach her at Tarplin, Downs & Young, where she now works as a lobbyist for insurance behemoth ... uh, WellPoint.
The Republican Party may be advocating the status quo, they may even be deliberately obstructing real reform. That’s what you expect them to do. It’s tradition.
That being said, we really need better democrats. Ones who aren’t in the pocket of the industry we’re trying to reform. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., talks a good game, but he’s new, so the jury is still out on him.
Full disclosure: I’m a registered democrat who cast his first ballot for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, but voted for Howard Dean, a democrat and former governor of Vermont, in that primary, and I still consider myself kind of spineless for not just voting Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.
I was an adamant Barrack Obama supporter back when people were still writing him off with comparisons to Jesse Jackson. I continued my endorsements of then Sen. Obama throughout the primaries, much to the chagrin of my largely pro-Hillary, democrat friends.
Then, we voted for change we could believe in and won. That’s how it felt, remember? We were all lighting firecrackers, dancing in the streets, hugging strangers and buying them drinks, like we’d just beat the Nazis. In a strictly emotional sense, we basically had.
President George W. Bush dictated national and domestic policy like a corrupt, despotic king. His administration passed the Orwellian nightmare known as the Patriot Act and used it to suspend habeas corpus and spy on its political opponents.
They initiated an illegal war of aggression based on falsehoods and scare tactics and gave defense contractors a gift-wrapped quagmire to milk for profits. They used brutal torture and sexual humiliation against prisoners of war, and practically bankrupted Social Security by using it as a piggy bank, just to name a few of their achievements.
Bush is gone and I’m still waiting for change. We all are.
Guantanamo Bay is still housing prisoners. Bombs are still falling on Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers are still dying. What gives Barrack? We’re all pulling for you, so, could you please remind us why?
Now a study published by the American Journal of Public Health found that roughly 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. We are literally dying for change we can believe in. All I see is a party squandering it’s majority status on the pursuit of change they can get away with.
So, now I’m feeling kind of spineless for not just voting Kucinich ... again.
