Health Care Should Be A Right
On Monday (11/13) I had surgery. On Wednesday evening (11/15) I was home. It seemed a little too soon, and would have been, had I not had a dedicated wife and a retired RN mom who were both willing to be there for me. In my mind it wasn’t major surgery, especially when considering some of the things I have been through, but any surgery where they open your stomach for nearly a foot in length is going to hurt a lot and as a result leave you very dependent on others. Not everyone is good at helping people get better. I am lucky to have had two that are very good.
Many of you know that I have the good fortune of being a kidney transplant recipient since 1997. This recent procedure made something related to that work better and it seems to have worked out well. Of course we are waiting for enough time to pass to see if that is the case, but it is looking good so far. Being in immediate danger and pain didn’t leave me much time to think about much else, but two weeks later I again have the time for thinking about our health care system.
The Democratic wins in Washington will probably not have the kind of impact I would like to see it have. When I have my first opportunity to sit down with Todd Stroger I will again tell him that the number one priority of 49th Ward from county government is to have a health clinic in the 49th Ward. It is one thing that the county can deliver. But that feels like asking for a fish when what we really need is an entire food production system. What we really need is health care system that places health care as a constitutionally guaranteed right, not an expectation or a hope.
In respect to health care, the only two groups of Americans I know of that have a constitutional right to health care are adult and juvenile offenders who are incarcerated. The rest of us get health care the same way we get housing or almost anything else in this society, we get what we can afford to pay for. Those who can pay the most get the best and those that can pay the least get the minimum or less than the minimum in many cases unless they are able to access care through “charity” for lack of a better word.
Recently, America hit a population of 300 million people. How many of you know that 1 of every 6, or approximately 50 million people, do not have health insurance? How many of you know that statistically you have a 39% chance of being a patient in an Emergency Room during the next year and that you have a greater than 30% chance of that visit resulting in a hospital admission? In a matter of hours you very well could spend thousands or eveb tens of thousands of dollars on getting well. In a matter of weeks you could spend more than you will earn in the next 10 years if you are really sick..
But what if you weren’t feeling well, but didn’t pass out or have severe pain? The emergency room isn’t going to admit you unless you are in immediate danger. If you have the money you will see a doctor in an office somewhere. If you don’t, you will wait until the E.R. is needed again. The problem is that for that plan to work you have to be in real danger which means you wait until you are sicker. That flies in the face of everything modern medicine tells us. And it is expensive, not to mention discriminatory.
There has to be an answer to this problem. Gov. Rod Blagojevich has started with All Kids, but there are a lot of questions about funding and implementation. The County and to a much smaller degree the city have a network of safety net institutions, but they aren’t enough. Even at the state level, the best one can hope for is that a program like All Kids will shame the federal officials into action and it could provide them with a road map to make it work.
As the generation of baby boomers grows older one can expect that health care will continue to rise in importance. All of the demographic and historical injust formation leads me to believe this is true, but the solution needs to address all of the public, not just the newly minted seniors. Fixing Social Security is also an important step, but it is not enough to make certain that everyone will have a right to care. I hope that we do not have to wait much longer for us to catch up with the rest of the western world and that we make health care a right rather than a privilege. Whenever you see an opportunity to increase support the right to health care I urge you to take advantage of it. Nearly every single one of us will eventually get sick ourselves and those that don’t will certainly know someone they love who does. We all benefit from better health care. America, lets get serious and make it happen.
