A Spoonful of Empathy
July 30th, 2009 © by Susan Swartz
I’ve been thinking about this one in six figure which divides America into who has health care coverage and who doesn’t. According to a Gallup Poll, 16 percent or one in six Americans over age 18 do not have health insurance. That number is a product of the current system, the broken one, the one that grows more inequitable and expensive the longer we wait to change it.
It’s a shameful statistic. It means that under the American health system, one in six can’t get into the lifeboat. One in six Americans – expendable.
You may not be the unfortunate person out of six, but you probably know one, especially in these tough times. A friend just lost her consulting job in San Francisco when her position was eliminated because of funding. The job’s gone and so is her health insurance. “You’re either part of one statistic or another,” she said.
My husband has a friend with a prostate problem and no health insurance. He’s hoping his body waits until he turns 65 and qualifies for Medicare. I know a woman in her 30s who’s been having chest pains but says she’ll wait until they get really bad and then drive herself to the ER.
Members of Congress who are deciding what to do about the one-in-six problem not only have a seat in the lifeboat, it comes with their name on a brass plaque. They have their own exclusive government-run public plan. In relating to the uninsured and underinsured population, they quite possibly suffer from an empathy deficit disorder.
Conservatives aren’t always big on empathy, the quality of relating in a visceral way to another person’s need, declaring it was not appropriate for a Supreme Court justice. But I think just a little empathy might be useful if you’re deciding on health coverage for all – including yourself.
What if one out of every six members of Congress was suddenly dropped from the government’s insurance plan? That would be 89 newly uninsured people who as members of Congress deciding on the health care bill, would be thinking about how to pay for their kid’s MRI and their own sudden heart surgery. Stripped of their government perk, 89 uninsured members of Congress might be very much in favor of having a public plan rather than be at the mercy of profit-minded insurance companies.
They’d have to think like real people, the ones without insurance and the ones who fear it losing it. Including people who stay with lousy jobs just for the insurance. Who worry about being laid off and having to shop for individual coverage. Who fear being denied because they once had a strange mole on their shoulder.
Critics say health care reform is too costly and we need to worry about the debt our children and grandchildren will face in the future. Future? The kids are here now. The future is this afternoon and tomorrow. If those kids don’t have a healthy beginning they’re not going to grow up and be able to pay anyone’s bills.
California’s new budget includes cutting health insurance for poor kids. Ten thousand kids in Sonoma County alone are going to lose medical insurance through the Healthy Families program for children in low income families, causing one health expert to call it a public health nightmare. Kids go back to school, flu season hits, the uninsured kids who before might have been going to their doctor with symptoms end up in class with the insured kids. Now, everyone gets sick.
It could be the same for Mr. and Ms. Congress Person sitting next to someone on a plane who’s afraid she has swine flu but can’t afford a doctor.
We all sneeze on each other. There’s your empathy.
Tags: empathy, healthcare_reform, Juicy_Tomatoes, Susan_Swartz
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July 31st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Aren’t these the same people who have slashed education budgets? What kind of future world do they have in mind?
July 31st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I’ve never really considered myself a conservative, though I used to be a liberal and I’m not anymore. I realized, as though hit by a bolt of lightening one day, that liberals were (gasp, shudder) socialists! Not for me.
The thing about America, which, as Doug Casey says was never a country so much as an IDEA, is that we never used to lean on government: rely on government to rescue us, save us, nurture us. That’s not what government is for! According to our founders, government is supposed to exist to defend our shores and little else. Hooray Founders!
America was a place where you came to make it or break it on your own. We did not rob the rich to benefit the poor. It’s simply not the American way. What made this a great country, IDEA if you will, was the notion that you could make a fortune and no one was going to take it away from you.
We are moving more and more toward socialism and that frightens me. A lot. I don’t want government interference in my health care. I don’t want the government deciding whether I’m to get a certain surgery or not. I don’t want Big Brother breathing down my neck.
Euro-Pacific’s president Peter Schiff has a terrific idea. Instead of going to socialized medicine (which is a disaster all over the world) why not pay for office visits out of pocket and leave the big stuff for insurance companies? Premiums would plummet and everyone could afford a policy. Problem solved.
I don’t want to lose my liberty—-what’s left of it. Big government=totalitarianism. How obvious can anything get?
MAG
August 1st, 2009 at 7:54 am
This should go national, a terrific brief indictment with such good sense. One almost doesn’t ask another person who’s lost their job–I just talked with a woman who’s been working in publishing all her life and has been put on leave because the company would love not to lose her but cannot afford to keep her–what they’re going to do about health insurance. Among the worst has to be people in early 50s, too young for Medicare by 15 years but considered past prime hire material especially if they’ve earned well and are skilled. What to do? Get out in the streets this summer, August, all over the country. Thanks for column.
August 1st, 2009 at 11:07 am
I’ve been hearing more and more about August in the streets to counter the huge Rush Limbaugh style ad campaign aimed at terrifying people about health care reform.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:29 am
“Empathy deficit disorder”… what a wonderful new malady and so applicable to our government officials. To my knowledge there is still no actual bill posted for the strong of heart to read. Not that the strong of heart would be able to stomach or digest the rhetoric it contains. Health care does need reform, but let congress set the example and be the first in line.
Lee
August 12th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Show me a picture or give me a metaphor and I will lock on to that image forever…The lifeboat image with only six of us permitted to get onboard while another human being flounders in the water is very, very disturbing to me. I am troubled that Amercians are not troubled by this fact.
Could it be that not all Americans know that one in six adults does not have health care coverage?
Could we use your image of the lifeboat, and make it the symbol for change? We could paper the streets with the new lifeboat symbol that would shame us all into providing health care for all Americans! And let’s make sure that the man or woman over-board looks like Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Blanchett in “Titanic”! We need star power on our side!
August 15th, 2009 at 5:43 am
This should go national, a terrific brief indictment with such good sense. One almost doesn’t ask another person who’s lost their job–I just talked with a woman who’s been working in publishing all her life and has been put on leave because the company would love not to lose her but cannot afford to keep her–what they’re going to do about health insurance. Among the worst has to be people in early 50s, too young for Medicare by 15 years but considered past prime hire material especially if they’ve earned well and are skilled. What to do? Get out in the streets this summer, August, all over the country. Thanks for column.; This should go national, a terrific brief indictment with such good sense. One almost doesn’t ask another person who’s lost their job–I just talked with a woman who’s been working in publishing all her life and has been put on leave because the company would love not to lose her but cannot afford to keep her–what they’re going to do about health insurance. Among the worst has to be people in early 50s, too young for Medicare by 15 years but considered past prime hire material especially if they’ve earned well and are skilled. What to do? Get out in the streets this summer, August, all over the country. Thanks for column.;;
August 16th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
You’re right, Diana. It is a troubling image, considering that it could be Leo or Kate or you or me or our kids overboard. We are all in this together.