Mothers, I've noticed, rarely do such things with so little planning. Sure, with Mom he'd have been better prepared, might have eaten better and come home a bit less pink but with me he got there two hours sooner and was spared having to schlep 150 lbs. of beach gear in a grueling, Shermanesque march to the sea. But that's not what I want to talk about.
As we tooled down the AC Expressway with the windows down and the iPod pushing our Polks to their limits I began to notice the billboards. Each as big as a house, they sang a siren song of easy money, scintillating entertainment (holy shit, Engelbert Humperdinck is still alive?!?) and...healthcare.
Now I've journeyed that back ribbon of asphalt a million times but for the first time I began to notice that there seemed to be almost as many healthcare-related billboards as there were for the casinos.
They were no less commercial than the signs advertising The Borgata, Harrah's, The Taj or Caesars and no less brazen in their efforts to entice. Only instead of catering to our greed or our affinity for has-been crooners they appealed to our fear of pain, disease and the ravages of age and time.
A few had pictures of smiling nurses, some of whom seemed kind and matronly and others who didn't appear old enough to drive a car, much less attend to the needs of the sick and infirm. Others showed masked physicians ready and waiting to practice the Art of Hippocrates. Still others touted their latest techno-miracle-gizmo-life-saving-thingamabob. Each vied for my attention and--of course--my healthcare dollar.
The folks on the signs looked so competent, so friendly, so earnest and eager to help. To care for me, to ease my pain and soothe my fears. But all for a price. I couldn't help but notice, though, how no mention was made about those without adequate means to feed the beast.
I'm not going to debate the fact that medical professionals are worth their weight in gold tongue depressors. They go to school for many years, often incurring staggering debts in the process and enter into a field where people's very lives are at stake. These people work without a net and deserve to be respected and very well compensated.
No, what bothers me is that healthcare in our beloved country is an industry. Not a service, an industry and far more often than not decidedly for-profit. To me that just doesn't seem right.
I firmly believe that some things are simply too important to be profit-driven and market-directed. Police and fire protection, for example. Both are paid for by our taxes and administered by--horrors!--The Government. The Big, Bad Government.
To those who complain that the government can't do anything right and that less government is always preferable to more government I say this: strike a blow for smaller government and refuse Medicare or unemployment benefits the next time they're offered to you. Ditto for those pinko public defenders. Get into a little scrape with the law and can't afford legal representation? Then I guess you'd better brush up on your jurisprudence, only don't go to a library because they too are a service of The Government.
Mail back those Social Security checks (oops...can't do that since the US Postal Service is government agency,) represent yourself in court and stand up to our incompetent, do-nothing government. And of course you'll also want to stock up on garden hoses lest you find yourself unprepared when your home goes up in flames. Fucking government! Who the hell do they think they are trying to protect, anyway?
Police and fire departments protect our property and our safety. Both are provided for by the government via our tax dollars and few would question that both satisfy basic rights of citizenry. Yet for some reason when it comes to protecting not our property but our health--if not our very lives--it's no longer considered important enough to be a right offered without question and universally, a right earned not by the size of our bank accounts but by the simple fact that we are Americans. Tax dollars for dowsing a smoldering meth lab? No problem. But public funds for kidney surgery or to correct a child's cleft palate? Quick, call Rand Paul!
You want to jump-start our moribund economy? How 'bout this: tomorrow we announce that every employer from coast to coast no longer has to saddle themselves with health care costs for their employees. You think freeing up a few hundred billion dollars a year might spark a bit of economic activity? Truth be told, I've never quite understood why it was that employers were ever involved with our health insurance in the first place, any more than they're involved with our home, car or snowmobile insurance.
Look, I'll be the first one to tell you that I'm no genius and God knows I don't have all of the answers. But I am a tax paying citizen of the United States and as such I would happily pay more in taxes as long as it was for something meaningful and important. And what could be more important than guaranteeing the health of every last American citizen? Medical care simply shouldn't be something that some citizens can afford and others cannot, any more than income or personal wealth should be a factor when your house is on fire.
There are some things that only government can do, things that by their very nature are purviews of sovereign nations. Things like coining currency and providing national defense, for example. It's easy to complain about our government but for all its faults government can be a place where people come together for the common good. To take care of not only our country as a national entity but of each other as individuals as well. To that end, what more important role could the government have than to ensure that none of its citizens should ever want for a basic level of healthcare? Isn't that the "life" part of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"
I'm not saying that the government should actually be in the position of providing healthcare but at the very least it should ensure its availability to every citizen in need and do so in an economically sound manner beyond expecting the poor--including the working poor--to descend upon emergency rooms for routine healthcare matters and possibly bankrupt themselves in the process should they require a hospital stay.
By all means, those with the financial means to afford an additional level of care beyond the minimum should be welcome to avail themselves of it but there should be a minimum standard of care--real care, good care--that is offered to every American citizen and paid for communally, just like we do for national defense. How we care for the least of us says much about who we are as a people. Hell, I'm an atheist and even I can recognize the wisdom of Matthew 25:40!
So what's the answer? I truly don't know. Medicare for all might be a good place to start, if not a single-payer system then at least a viable public option. Yes, we live in a capitalist society but that doesn't mean that everything has to turn a profit. Some things are just too import to be left to the whims of the market. But then again, what would we do with all of those empty billboards?
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| Med Money |
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