November 29, 2008
November 23, 2008
Welcome to America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care
It's situation criticalSun, November 23, 2008 | Lisa Van Dusen | Sun Media
On the morning of last June 19, in the waiting room of the psychiatric ward of King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, Esmin Green slumped from her chair to the floor. She lay there for almost an hour, ignored by other patients and staff, before dying of causes still undetermined.
The hospital's closed circuit security cameras produced a video so disturbing (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA29VwnZ4cE), that when it was released two weeks later it got worldwide attention.
Green was a 49-year-old mother of six. In the days before her death, she lost her job in a day care centre, then lost her apartment: One version of a story that will happen more and more as the economic meltdown trickles down every Main Street.
That the video of Green's death surfaced in the middle of the presidential campaign seemed like a cry for help from a system that works for fewer and fewer people at higher and higher costs.
The United States health care system is a spaghetti junction full of toll booths set up by private insurance companies that provide coverage for care in the form of HMOs (health maintenance organizations), PPOs (preferred provider organizations) and POS (point of service) programs. Most Americans (60%) get health coverage from these companies through their employers.
There are government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for people without private insurance but roughly 15% of Americans remain uninsured. The ones who are insured interface with doctors and hospitals using a business lexicon of deductibles and co-payments and non-network treatment and paperwork unfathomable in both volume and content.
The system costs more per capita than any other on earth and represents a greater chunk of GDP (15%) than any other UN member except the Marshall Islands. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation that doesn't have universal health care.
When I moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time explaining that the Canadian health care system wasn't a choice-less socialist nightmare of back-alley quacks and deadly wait times to people who couldn't believe universal health care could be so straightforward.
The most rattling culture shock then was getting used to a health care system that had the same creative accounting scandals, advertising schemes and class divides as any other business. The amount of money floating around it -- from liability insurance and personal injury attorneys to $500 bedpan suppliers to fly-by-night providers who post hand-scrawled ads on utility poles -- is staggering.
The horrors of the system chronicled in news accounts about people such as Green and by Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko happen every day and will be happening more and more a the economy worsens.
Money question
But Americans make decisions involving health coverage all the time that you never think of when it all comes down to one card in your wallet: Career choices, personal choices, where to live, what to do on a Saturday afternoon with your kids, whether to go to an emergency room.
The Canadian system has been strained in the past decade and we're a lot less self-righteous about it now, but when Canadians talk about the merits of changing it, the bottom line isn't so much the bottom line as a consensus on the value of fairness.
U.S. polls conducted before the economy dwarfed all other issues showed that most Americans share that view.
Fifteen years ago, when the Clintons tried to overhaul the U.S. health care system, resistance from the insurance lobby proved fatal.
Now, even the health insurers are admitting that change is needed (last week, two insurance lobby groups agreed to cover sick people as well as healthy ones, if they really have to) and that health care is becoming a huge economic problem.
New presidents can only focus on so many priorities and Barack Obama is a new president at a time when the things that need fixing seem outnumbered only by the obstacles to fixing them. But his reported choice of former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who wrote the book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, means this is a priority.
While the economy, energy, education and climate change need fixing, people aren't dying in classrooms or in gas stations because of a system that seems based on the very un-American idea that some lives are worth more than others.
November 22, 2008
November 18, 2008
November 17, 2008
November 15, 2008
November 9, 2008
Morning in America
By Eugene Robinson |Thursday, November 6, 2008 | Washington Post
I almost lost it Tuesday night when television cameras found the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Chicago's Grant Park and I saw the tears streaming down his face. His brio and bluster were gone, replaced by what looked like awestruck humility and unrestrained joy. I remembered how young he was in 1968 when he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., moments before King was assassinated and hours before America's cities were set on fire.
I almost lost it again when I spoke with Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bravest leaders of the civil rights crusade, and asked whether he had ever dreamed he would live to see this day. As Lewis looked for words beyond "unimaginable," I thought of the beating he received on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the scars his body still bears.
I did lose it, minutes before the television networks projected that Barack Obama would be the 44th president of the United States, when I called my parents in Orangeburg, S.C. I thought of the sacrifices they made and the struggles they endured so that my generation could climb higher. I felt so happy that they were here to savor this incredible moment.
I scraped myself back together, but then almost lost it again when I saw Obama standing there on the stage with his family -- wife Michelle, daughters Malia and Sasha, their outfits all color-coordinated in red and black. I thought of the mind-blowing imagery we will see when this young, beautiful black family becomes the nation's First Family.
Then, when Michelle's mother, brother and extended family came out, I thought about "the black family" as an institution -- how troubled it is, but also how resilient and how vital. And I found myself getting misty-eyed again when Barack and Michelle walked off the stage together, clinging to one another, partners about to embark on an adventure, full of possibility and peril, that will change this nation forever.
It's safe to say that I've never had such a deeply emotional reaction to a presidential election. I've found it hard to describe, though, just what it is that I'm feeling so strongly.
It's obvious that the power of this moment isn't something that only African Americans feel. When President Bush spoke about the election yesterday, he mentioned the important message that Americans will send to the world, and to themselves, when the Obama family moves into the White House.
For African Americans, though, this is personal.
I can't help but experience Obama's election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance -- which is patently absurd, if you think about it. The labor of black people made this great nation possible. Black people planted and tended the tobacco, indigo and cotton on which America's first great fortunes were built. Black people fought and died in every one of the nation's wars. Black people fought and died to secure our fundamental rights under the Constitution. We don't have to ask for anything from anybody.
Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans -- white, black, Latino, Asian -- entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency. I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there's more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there's more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.
It's not that I would have felt less love of country if voters had chosen John McCain. And this reaction I'm trying to describe isn't really about Obama's policies. I'll disagree with some of his decisions, I'll consider some of his public statements mere double talk and I'll criticize his questionable appointments. My job will be to hold him accountable, just like any president, and I intend to do my job.
For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say "it's morning again in America." The new sunshine feels warm on my face.
