Jordan Zakarin

They Want Me Dead

Running parallel to this personal health care struggle of mine has been an even more painful national health care struggle, the battle for universal health care. Soulless opponents have wielded rhetorical and financial weapons far sharper than the sternum buzzsaw that ripped through my chest, and unlike my positive prognosis, I’m not so sure the country is going to end up better off, with all the right prescriptions.

I’ve written about this before in this space, but since about the time I got home from the hospital, the “debate” has really heated up and reached the final stretch drive. Quotations necessary, of course, because no one is debating the merit of policy, as is the subscribed purpose of Congress — we know the best medicine. Getting it administered, however, has been the struggle. Think of it as a national Nurse Ratchet.

The only way to fix a system that leaves 50 million without the opportunity to go to a doctor, 44,000 a year dead and millions more bankrupt because of that lack of opportunity, is to actually, you know, fix the system.

Health insurers, who provide no service other than to their lavishly compensated (with your premium dollars) CEOs, are the problem. The real solution would be to totally eliminate these vampire squids and implement single payer, in which the government (which already spends more money on health care than any other democracy because we are so goddamn inefficient and give so much money away to insurers) pays for health care for its citizens. It’s cheaper, it’s what the rest of the world does, and it’d make the country healthier and more affluent and able to look at itself in the damn mirror.

But that’s not going to happen, because our representatives are addicted to campaign cash. The next best option?  The public option, which is kind of like a slice of singe payer.

Public option is short for a government run health insurance option that would run without a profit motive (and thus not deny care, deny claims and jack premiums at a whim), would keep these insurers honest, so much as the weasels running them are capable of such a human action.

That would lead to lower costs and better care, for those in the public option and those still stuck with private insurers.

Private insurers don’t like this idea, and they’re fighting with everything they’ve got to lie and distort and scare people into not supporting it. Unfortunately for them, the American people occasionally sniff out bullshit when the steer’s ass is sitting on their face, and 60% support such a public option.

The last few days has been filled with good news for public option supporters — Speaker Pelosi is pushing the strongest possible public option in the House, and it looks like Harry Reid has seen his electoral future and suddenly grown a spine, as word has it that he’s pushing a public option with opt-out, which means that backwater states could opt out of the public option if they hate their citizens enough. Which would be electoral suicide, and wouldn’t happen.

But it isn’t all good — the supposed supporter of the public option, President Obama, is getting all hard for Olympia Snowe to lift her ankle length skirt to show a little bi-partisan skin. She doesn’t support the public option, because she got AHIP branded on her ass in exchange for some campaign cash, and so reports are that Obama is now pushing back against the public option, right as Reid is a vote or two away from securing its historic passage and could really use the President’s inexplicable popularity.

Instead, Obama is pushing Snowe’s trigger fetish, no matter how preposterous it is. Basically, it says to insurers, here’s five more complementary years of fucking people over. Just make sure you meet incredibly minimum standards of pretending you aren’t completely screwing your customers, and then we won’t make you compete with the government in a few years beyond that.

Sure, it’s designed explicitly to destroy the public option Obama has insisted he supports, but if Olympia wants it, she gets it, right?

I’m not sure if he’s been watching too much cable news (and given the push back against Fox, it sure seems like he’s been watching as much TV as me, the couch-bound convalescent), but I’d like to remind the President that no one in America, outside that self important swamp, gives even half a shit if a bill is bipartisan. Because when a woman comes down with breast cancer and actually has health insurance that doesn’t deny her care and so she can maybe continue her life and not sell her house, she’s not going to be suffering from a tinge of guilt because the Olympia Snowe really didn’t think she ought to have been able to enroll in her affordable insurance program.

Really, I wish I could tell the President that there is every reason that I shouldn’t be alive right now. I’m lucky to have health care, but a lot of my friends do not, because of this shitty job market. If I didn’t get the job I have now, who knows — I could have been without insurance. And without the MRI that confirmed I needed surgery. And without this goddamn soreness I’m stumbling around the house with, this life saving soreness, because I really needed surgery.

It becomes a lot more urgent when we’re talking about peoples’ lives and not corporate profits and bending some imaginary cost structure. If President Obama successfully kills the public option, he’s breaking his biggest campaign promise, and worse, the so-called Hope he instilled in tens of millions of Americans just looking for a chance to live healthy lives without having to give up everything that makes those lives worth living.

But that’s politics, right? The bipartisan optics look so much better to the campaign consultants than saving mine or other lives. You can’t put that in a slogan or a yard sign. Or pay for those slogan-spinning consultants or yard signs, because there won’t be the corporate campaign cash there to fuel it.

Notes

  1. jordansheartsucks posted this
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