health care reform is a moral issue

Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, devoted his entire show last night to a Special Comment. You can listen to it by clicking on this link. He argues that it is both immoral and anti-American that one’s access to health care depends upon how much money one has; how wrong it is that a father has to go bankrupt to pay for a child’s medical treatment while others get the best health care money can buy because they’re rich.

We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike’s daughter does, because by the accident of life, I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.

The resources exist for your father and mine to get the same treatment to have the same chance and to both not have to lie there worried about whether or not they can afford to live!

Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear — fear not of disease but of Deductibles? Right now, right now, somebody’s father is dying because they don’t have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don’t have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father that’s called health care reform!

Death is the issue! How can we not be unified against death? I want my government helping my father to fight death! I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help my father fight to live and I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help your father fight to live! I want it to spend my money first on fighting death. Not on war! Not on banks! Not on high speed rail!

Olbermann proposes that we donate to the organization that brings together medical professionals to provide free clinics to the uninsured and under insured so they can hold free clinics in the capitol cities of the six Democratic Senators blocking real health care reform: “I want Sens. Lincoln and Pryor to see what health care poverty is really like in Little Rock. I want Sen. Baucus to see it in Butte. I want Sen. Ben Nelson to see it in Lincoln. I want Sen. Landro to see it in Baton Rouge. I want Sen. Reid to see it in Las Vegas.” It makes a lot of sense to me, so I will donate what I can when the mechanism is put into place.

My fear is that Health Care Reform will be enacted—as it should be, with the public option—but that Congress is its infinite ineptitude won’t protect us from being gouged by the insurance companies before the reforms are in place (2013, the last I read). Like the royal screwing we’re getting now from the credit card banks because Congress neglected to protect us during the interim. But my greatest fear is that the USA really is an oligarchy, a 21st Century banana republic, and Congress will cave and do nothing, or as close to nothing as they can.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/08/09 at 03:20 PM
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