The bottom line in health care, taxpayer’s money and conservative illogic.

Cleita

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Thu Jan-08-04 12:38 PM
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The bottom line in health care, taxpayer’s money and conservative illogic.

I love my husband’s clinical nurse. She is a dear sweet woman, a true nursing professional and alas also a rabid Republican. She believes without a doubt that everyone should pull themselves up by the bootstraps and if they have to work two or three jobs to do it then they should. No one should be looking for handouts. She is adamantly against welfare.

Yet, she seems unaware that her salary comes mostly from taxpayer’s money. How? Well she’s the head nurse at our local dialysis clinic. You see if you have end stage renal disease very few private health care plans provide coverage, so the burden falls on Medicare to provide care for these patients who need dialysis, transplants and all the other clinical care involved in these diseases.

Medicare covers most patients with end stage renal disease no matter what their age is and very few are elderly. Most are people in the prime of life when struck with kidney failure. Without dialysis they have a death sentence. With dialysis, they can lead productive lives. My husband’s care exceeds $3,000 a month, something we couldn’t manage on our income without help. No private insurance company or HMO wants to pay for this. Without a government program, most of these people would die from lack of medical care even though it is available because the cost is beyond the reach of the average wage earner.

Since Medicare pays only 80%, we must come up with the other 20%. We do this with a Medigap private policy, but he would never be insured if laws hadn’t been passed preventing private insurers from discriminating against insuring those with pre-existing conditions. So you see again we all have to rely on the government to get the care he needs and our health care providers the payments for services they need. Yet, this fact is lost on this nurse.

Another thing that people, who are against entitlements, are unaware of, is that the health insurance industry, by cherry picking the healthy in providing coverage, leaves the burden of those with diseases like my husband’s to government plans that many times don’t offer adequate coverage. As things stand now, politicians are eroding the funding even more in order to pay for wars and enrich the coffers of corporations. My husband’s nurse knows that it is the taxpayer who funds these programs and yet seems unwilling to admit that her wages comes from that money and if the spigot is turned off, she will be out of a job.

Sure, she probably will get another job, maybe one that doesn’t pay so well, because she will be competing with all those other nurses who have been put out of work because Medicare has been privatized and money will be diverted to profits, not health care. Yet for some strange reason, otherwise intelligent people can’t admit that they too should benefit from their tax dollars.

They effectively go through life blindfolded, not seeing that they are on borrowed affluence, until it is too late. Many don’t want to know that their wages are paid for by taxpayers either directly or indirectly.
I once had to point out to my proud Republican father, that if the government hadn’t provided his company with all kinds of subsidies, he wouldn’t have a job because the company would fold, which is exactly what happened once the product wasn’t needed anymore, because it had been replaced with a space age improved version.
Yet, it always amazes me that those who are on the government payroll, like policemen, firemen, and the military are the most rabid Republicans around.

Also, what about welfare? Many children, whose parents can’t get it, must go without a health plan. Are the children expected to go get jobs so they can get health benefits, food and a roof over their heads? What about the disabled and the elderly, should they get jobs? Even those who want jobs, can’t find many employers who will hire them. A few social programs like health care, day care and subsidized rent would go a long way to pulling a lot of these people into the mainstream, yet conservatives feel that for some reason they have their hand out looking for freebies.

Now what about those old people, who need some free pills? Were they not the soldiers, mothers, workers, teachers and healers of former generations, who now need a helping hand? Why are they accused of having their hand out? Do they not deserve to live their lives normally and not die from lack of medicine, food, or heat after all they have contributed to society? Why did their needed prescription drug money go to the pharmaceutical industry and privatized HMO coverage instead of directly to them as they need it?

The problem with conservative logic is that they don’t carry their thinking all the way through to the logical conclusion. They don’t understand that disasters, accidents and other unexpected twists of fate happen, and the ordinary working class person is ill-equipped to handle these emergencies alone, no matter how hard working they are. They also don’t seem to realize that when they grow old, they will be sick a good part of their golden years and they will need health and other types of care until they have the final illness that causes them to die. They will be too ill to work through these times. No one will want to hire them either.

Also, the children of these elderly seem to not be aware of the fact that if there are no safety net programs for grandma and grandpa not to mention mom and dad in the future, they will have to take on the full burden of taking care of these relatives themselves, and usually this comes at a time when families are trying to send children to college and generally helping to give them a start in life when they marry and have the first grandchild.

So what does it take to change conservative logic into common sense logic? It’s usually the day that something awful happens and they watch everything they had worked for evaporate before their eyes. I have never seen a Republican refuse to line up for government relief funds at times of disasters like earthquakes and fires. So why do they renege it if their tax dollars are spent on those who need the relief of health and welfare programs instead of making a lot of rich corporations and their stockholders richer? They may think their tax money is wasted on helping the poor, the sick, the disabled, yet when it’s their turn they are up at the government relief counter like everyone else.

So how do we convince them that it’s okay to help out your fellow man when he’s in need and that you too will have your turn at the table when the time comes? How do you tell him charity doesn’t have to be through a church, but that the government can effectively distribute help and are better equipped to get the dollars to those who need them without any corporate or religious middle man needed. How do we break the myth of fat, lazy, people looking for a handout? Our social systems are reaching a crucial breaking point now and we have to fix it by convincing people like my husband’s nurse that entitlement programs are not evil and are an efficient method of helping everyone in society.

All societies have functioned more or less on social principles. The fit and able do most of the work, caring for the children and elderly. They share their bounty as well as their misfortunes. We have gotten to a stage in civilization that there should be no reason every person on the face of this earth doesn’t have his basic needs met. It will always be the population in the middle of their lives that provide for the young, the old, and the disabled. They provide for their own children, but also the generation who raised them. When it is their turn those children will provide for them, or so that’s how our society should work.