Watching the senate disport itself on the matter of a public health insurance option is like watching very very old children drawing lines in the sand. In a very real sense the lines don’t mean anything. The real estate is so much larger than the superegos involved. The tide will come soon and wash the whole thing away. The tide in this instance is whatever you want to call it. If you’re a staunch supporter of the status quo and believe that big insurance should be left alone then you also believe by extension that those without insurance are provisional citizens with provisional rights. Certainly Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley feels this way. As he so aptly put it to a citizen at a town hall meeting anyone who doesn’t have good health care should just get a job with the government. The incontestable cynicism of the position is, well, incontestable. That’s why it is a line in the sand. By further degrees one may suppose that when the tide finally comes none of us will be here to experience the results. Of course to continue with this tortured figure the children who can’t leave the beach will drown. That of course is too bad. They shouldn’t have gone to the beach in the first place.
Meanwhile if you’re a supporter of a public health care option you believe that Medicare and Medicaid offer good examples of responsive government health care but you likely will overlook the disaster that is repeatedly represented by the Veterans Administration. Some who oppose a public insurance option are simply Social Darwinists who would let the children drown on the beach but others see in the failure of the VA good reason to doubt the efficacy and the humanity of government run health care.
This is of course another line in the sand. But the ultimate question as the President keeps saying is that by adopting a public option we as Americans have the opportunity to save money, deneiro, smackeroos, sawbucks.
The shame alluded to above rests with the fact that once the argument becomes strictly a matter of dollars we are no longer talking about the quality of life of our citizenry. The statistics that show our national infant mortality rate and the terrible inequities of medical care for minorities and the elderly are disgraceful.
Those in the senate who voted today against a public health insurance option have not proposed any way to redress the matter I’ve just brought to the page. Not at all. And this is a national shame.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
I completely agree that America needs a public option for health care, and that all Americans, regardless of income or circumstance should be able to receive good, competent, affordable care.
I don’t agree entirely with the example of the VA as a government healthcare program gone bad. While the VA has its drawbacks — they are many and complicated, particularly in regards to caring for our servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — the VA also has its very good points. I’m lucky enough to be able to say that from first hand experience.
I have severe rheumatoid arthritis. A while back, I was laid off from my job. I lost my health insurance and couldn’t afford COBRA payments. Eventually I was able, because I’m an Air Force veteran with a minor service-related disability, to get my health care through the VA.
Since then I’ve received the best care I’ve ever had, bar none. I have a VA rheumatologist, I have frequent blood tests (the meds I’m taking have serious side effects sometimes) and the gynecologist I saw caught a breast lump. It was biopsied and found benign. I have a yearly physical. My doctor is encouraging and helpful. And everyone I’ve dealt with over the last 18 months have been professional, friendly and concerned. I pay for my health care services through the VA, but the amount is set according to what I can reasonably afford.
I am lucky.
If this is what universal health care — or even a “public option” could be like should we ever pass real health care insurance reform, then I’m all for it. It stuns me that there are people in our government — and many of our fellow citizens — who have decided that those of us without jobs, and without insurance, should simply be written off as less than human and not worth caring for.
Shame on them.
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Dspair is like appetite itself. You can’t get rid of it by a trick of the mind. These days I feel plenty of ruinous dolor and yet when I think back on it, I’ve felt these strans of pessimism all my life. Improvements in culture are incremental and not usually great leaps forward. When I was in College there was no such thing as civil rights for people with disabilities. No one, even just two years ago ever thought we would have an African-American president. So I endeavor daily to recall that these advancements are not small things. The Hattie Larlham Act–that guarantees equal pay for equal work for women–again, no small thing. When I was in college we never thought we’d get rid of Nixon. So I take these facts to heart and try for the long view whenever possible. America will rise or fall as a nation around the issue of taking care of its citizens. Just so, we once rose to the task of outlawing slavery. While these two circumstances ar not identical the future applies in each instance and I have to continue to believe in the future. So those are my thoughts on this cool autumn morning in Iowa.
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Bravo. A sober bravo. And now, in your wisdom, please tell us how to comport ourselves, how not to let this travesty ruin our days, our futures, especially those of us who live, daily, with a person with disabilities.
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