Public Option Part II: Do you wish he was dead?
Dear Congress:
I’ve written about him here. He’s an early middle age working class guy. He’s been trying to work off a mountain of debt, but like Sisyphus pushing the rock, he never quite did…He has a wife (also not employed right now) and a dog. Up until December he had a job.
(Guess that unlike super rich Wall Streeters his employer was not too big to fail.)
Shortly afterward (33 days I think) he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He was uninsured. Somehow…he got the treatment he needed at a Bigshot Reasearch Hospital, which parenthetically, was the same hospital that treated me for cancer and saved my life back in 1991.
Because of that, I was brimming with positive when I spoke to him. They’d saved me, they would save him.
No doubt.
And they did. He’s recovering now. I couldn’t be happier.
He got his first bill this week for the twelve weeks of inpatient radiation.
75,000.00
He just looked at it and laughed. You have to when you get a bill that big.
What the hell else can you do?
And who loses? He does because a bankruptcy just went through on earlier bills, so this one cannot go on it.
The Bigshot Teaching Hospital also loses because instead of being reimbursed for less than they’d like to be…they get nothing. Nada. Not a Dime.
If he’d had a Public Option he could have been subsidized under…
the teaching hospital would have gotten *some* reimbursement for his care.
What would the opponents of health care reform have done, I wonder…said, “Make him go away?”
I suppose I should be glad there isn’t a “Futile Care,” law in his state yet…
Something to do…
It always helps in the trenches of living with cancer…to have a goal for still being here, a purpose….I don’t think I’d still be here if I hadn’t had the driven mantra of “I have to get better before he (the late husband) gets worse.”
Well, Senator Edward M. Kennedy certainly believes he’s got something to do…a purpose to accomplish, the goal of real healthcare reform…and his cancer is levels of magnitude more lethal than my Hodgkins Lymphoma ever was….
Here’s his column about healthcare from the Boston Globe…and he notes that a public option would be part of his plan.
The fourth element of his setup is of particular interest, but you really need to read the whole thing….
Fourth, we’ll make it possible for the elderly and disabled to live at home and function independently. Our bill will help them afford to put ramps in their homes, pay someone to check in on them regularly, or any of an array of supports that will enable them to stay in their communities instead of in nursing homes.
And, like any other patient meant to cost the for profit insurers any money…. (I’m going to sound truly evil here, but I’ve spent time in the private insurance maze…)
I’d imagine there’s been some private discussion in some office somewhere…
Of trying to wait the Senator out.
Waiting until his voice on healthcare is only a legacy, and not a living breathing fighting legislator, negotiator, orator and cancer patient.
Will all of you, corporate and legislative, lined up to protect *money*…. will you actually sleep well at night if you’re able to gut this idea into ineffectuality? Will your consciences stay silent if you stall the process all together? Will you, privately, of course….
Express *relief* if heathcare reform is stalled all together past the lifespan of Senator Kennedy?
It makes me sick to think about.
Do the righteous thing….One Time. Lay down your cost/benefit analyses, your cost avoidance strategies, your quota of appeal denials per month.
Just *ucking drop them!
Suck it up, pass healthcare reform, and go to bed….
You can wake up the next day and find a new money hoarding scheme that doesn’t intersect lethally with the well-being of our citizens.
I’m bemused…
Into politics for a minute:
Arlen Specter is now … a conservative … Democrat?
If I was able to stand, I’d have fallen over after reading this. If I could drink alchohol I’d be heading to a bar to have a margarita (due to crazed astonishment.)
Wow. Just Wow.
Not to be a cynic, but I think expediency has to do with this…He knows he’d lose in a Republican primary after recent votes….
But honestly? I think there is at least a partial personal side to this:
If he’s survived cancer, he has had at least a tiny window into real pain…
The present GOP scoffs at suffering, and maybe he just can’t.
But then again there’s McCain: Tortured, and in there pitching for the GOP.
A member of the family.
No, I’m not related to him. He’s a big cheerful guy who is most comfortable in the outdoors on a boat, fishing or not, or even the occasional hunting trip.
He’s also a Star Wars geek, and a carpenter… and he still calls me ‘Cuzz.’
He was my cousin’s husband, the cousin that always felt like my sister, before she passed away after a seven year long fight against complications of diabetes, she ended up with both visual and mobility impairment…It was a long difficult time for both of them.
In late 1991 they came to our house for pizza. Black humor often takes center stage when you feel overwhelmed by the fight your body is fighting.
My cousin Tiffany said, “Hey, do you *believe* how many separate diseases are in this room?”
My late husband, never one to shirk at odd conversation said, laughing, “Let’s make a list! ” He said, “Hmm, I’ll start. Hemophilia and AIDS.”
I took the next round. “Cerebral Palsy, Asthma and Cancer…”
Tiffany was next…”Diabetes, sarcodosis, glaucoma, kidney failure…”
And her husband said, “Hey!…I feel kinda left out!”
We couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes.
It’s very clear that we’ve kept the connection because somehow, I don’t know why, he has a small obligation somewhere in his head that we should keep in touch and that he should look out for me in an appropriately small way.
One of my most profound regrets is that I didn’t spend as much time with them as I think I should have when her illnesses accelerated. I could mealymouth around it, but the cold hard truth is: after just finishing myself and the spouse’s long nightmare with my cancer and his terminal illness in 1993, my selfish want was that I *never* had to see another loved one suffer up close, never again…and so out of pure selfishness and fear, I was never close enough for very long. I did rejoice with them both and visited for longer stretches after she had a kidney transplant that freed her from the extreme discomfort of dialysis.
Near the end in 1998 I visited her in the hospital and tried to tell her who I was by sign, since she was blind and most of her hearing had eroded…I think she knew, because she smiled.
At the cemetery, he and I were crying. We looked at each other and moved into this huge hug that many misinterpreted…they thought he and I would be the ‘rebound’ sort of thing for each other…It wasn’t like that at all.
We’d both seen spouses through unspeakable things, and had part of our own innards pulled out emotionally in order that we support them as they needed.
He is the one person who understands as much of the entire scope of what I went through as an outsider can… and he believes, I think, that I am the same for him. Comrades in arms, in a way.
He remarried this decade and she’s been great both to him and for him, and …we get along well.
And after all the **** that his life has had in it….
He lost his job in December.
He has no health insurance.
He has no money (and by that I don’t mean even 500 a month. I. mean. none. zero.) He’s applied for SSDI Medicaid, Welfare, food stamps but those things take time.
His wife cannot work.
His electric, cable, phone have been shut off.
They’re repossesing his car next week.
And his landlord has indicated that unless the rent is paid in two weeks they will start proceedings against him. (When I heard this piece last night, I googled Ohio’s legal-aid website, gave him the number, and told him to call from his brothers phone, so they can stop the landlord from trying to evict him…I can’t do much from here, but by God, I owe him at least an effort to keep a roof over his head. )
But, he won’t be home this week anyway…
Because they’ve found throat cancer. The hospital he’s going into for the first round of 96 hours of chemo+radiation is helping him with an indigent program intended to ‘tide him over,’ until the benefits kick in.
There are two, single, very bright spots in all this.
One, from exploratory results, the cancer has not, metasisized. It is confined to a single source only.
and Two…the hospital he’s in…is the same Bigshot Hospital that saved my ass from cancer back in 91-92.
So, they’ll nail the cancer, I’m certain of it. He’ll walk out of there cancer free sometime in the future just like I did.
He’s chosen to be my family, and I’ve chosen to be his…
It’s interesting….because some parents or family members of person’s with disabilities can show ambivalence or negative emotion that they have this person in their lives…a relative…that they believe has made them work harder as a parent or family member than they would have had to do if the person was temporarily able-bodied.
I love my genetic family, but honestly, sometimes…
I love my friends, my family-of-choice a tiny bit more.
Because there are the occasional fights, the disagreements…the drifting away…
But not ambivalence. They want to hang out with me knowing (by this time, my sometimes difficult nature). They take me as is, where I am…no questions.
So I’m praying for my Cuzz today.
And I wish to any-gods-that-ever-were that the Congress would suck it up for health’s sake and *pass something,* so that he can have a *job* when he recovers.
Broken cipher
When did I turn left,
That corner, bend, crosstreet that means ‘liberal’
I was bent that way quick and painful…but I would have gotten there by the scenic route anyhow.
The family, you see. They’ve been wondering. When did I become a member of the ‘Democrat Party’ (cue shudder for wrong spelling)
I never was ‘on the right.’ Just wanted to be apolitical, research from the primary sources,case by case…
It began in March of ‘89 when I was advised my beloveds clock was ticking…
Or, did it begin in 1987 when our first friend Ray died?
Or, was it 1982, before he returned to my life, when I knew nothing, and he was given Hobson’s choice, take the factorate, sign the waiver and you’ll-never-be-able-to-sue-but-you-will-be-able-to-be-treated-for-your-existing-life-threatening-condition?
Or, was it 1981 again, before me and after me, when he actually believed with Falwell on the projection screen that it was gods-vengeance-against-the-gays…
It began for me in 1987, when I began to form my own opinion about the conflicting medical data and four allegedly private, allegedly medical providers,who had allegedly used unsafe places to get medicine and allegedly unsafe practices in preparing it.
Or, completely separately my own cancer, having nothing to do with him, when I was first told I was in immediate danger of death, and then the story changed…I’d have to wait three weeks have someone actually start holding off death, to go to another hospital. God obliged, I suppose, because I lasted those three weeks.
Or a brief bit of political hilarity in 1992 when my mother in law was scandalized by the husband’s “Jessie Jackson– Jobs Peace Justice” t-shirt. He wore it to mow her lawn and drink a well deserved beer in her kitchen….he’d made quite a journey from Falwell to Jackson, and voted for Clinton…the guy who lied and then, nobody died. And then Jesse Helms sent him correspondence that informed my husband that his ticket was punched for hell. And made my husband cry.
(I think the husband wouda been a Hilary person, today…maybe Obama, maybe not.)
Was it In 1996 when I read that: Allegedly in June 1982 Six*months*after*they*were*allegedly told by the *alleged* govenment watchdog agency that they must retool, relearn the process to avoid *alleged* contamination of the *alleged medicine. that had previously not been the alleged instrument of his death, but the thing that kept him alive…
Why would anyone think I could trust a corporation after that? About anything?
Don’t trust them when they give you products and don’t trust them when you work for them.
Just don’t.
Or in 1998 when my life and Trent Lott’s intersected briefly.
He was holding up some small sliver of justice regarding my spouse’s demise and I sent him an email:
“Shame on you, Senator.”
It was, in fact my first ‘political dissent’
And then 9/11 forced us all to look at the whole world, not just our own personal little mistrusts.
2002. They make stuff up, and we start a second war. Money, disability,civilians women children soldiers….wrong war wrong place….And always my grim pragmatism outside of any moral outrage, “Who, for f***’s sake said we had *money* to give away to wage war like this?” I certainly didn’t.
Afghanistan I might have agreed with a blank check for in the beginning. (Yes, I’m the sort of bleeding heart liberal that wants Osama’s head on a pike in Times Square. I’m all soft and squishy like that.)
Not Iraq.
And even for Afghanistan: Torture? I never agreed to that. If we torture, then *they will too.* I don’t want the torturing of US soldiers on my conscience thanks. Gitmo? Well *that* worked out well, didn’t it.
Throwing CIA people under the bus to make political points. Ditching the Geneva Convention. More wiretapping of all of us here, so they don’t have to do it over there…Didn’t agree to that either.
The legal concept of Posse Comitatus stripped away, and not yet restored. (Habeas Corpus is on it’s way back, though. ) The politicization of the Departments of Education, Vocational Rehabilitation and Justice.
And then 2005. I admitted I was impaired and read a flood of blogs about neglect, abuse, abandonment, invisibility,disrespect…and began wishing that the Democrats would not just work for us, but know about us too.
And Katrina showed just how much this great country could do for it’s poor and/or minority and/or impaired people if they were trapped with no way out
Why would I trust that govermnent. About anything?
And (deep breath) That, family of mine, is why I am a Democrat.
