Health Care Reform

I’ve been trying to back off the political stuff and focus on creativity, but sometimes I think I’m going to lose my mind reading and listening to all the misinformation, especially the crap published in the local newspaper and the stuff I hear from people I talk to in person, here in Midland, Texas, the Home of Angry Republicans.

I know lots of people who believe health care is just fine the way it is. Hell, I could argue the same thing:  we have good insurance, I get good health care, I get to choose my health care providers. Things could continue like they are, and I’d be fine.

But.

Where I differ from many other similarly privileged Americans is that I don’t think everybody else is just like me. I don’t believe that everyone else has the same good life I have. And—and here’s the real core of the matter—I don’t believe that those who do not have the things I have—health care, insurance, good doctors—deserve to suffer.

You know it’s true:  a lot of the people who are marching and yelling and protesting and whining about the Downfall of Our Country are pretty much saying, “Screw the rest of you.” They figure if you can’t afford insurance, you don’t deserve health care and some reasonable expectation that you won’t be forced to suffer with some horrid but treatable disease simply because you’re uninsured. It’s easy to like things the way they are if things the way they are are working nicely for you and your family and your friends, all of whom have lives pretty much just like yours.

Unlike those people, I know people whose lives are different from mine. I know people who can’t afford insurance, and I know people who have been denied care. Since I know lots of artists, I know lots of people who are self-employed, and if you know anything about that, you know all about the expense of getting insurance when you’re self-employed. And what about small business owners, like the one I interviewed this morning who’s really, really worried:  prices keep going up, and sales just aren’t happening. People depend on your for a salary and for things like insurance, but you can’t provide those things if the money isn’t coming in. Where does that put you, with people depending on you? With YOU depending on nobody but you?

Unlike the people out there foaming at the mouth about how health care reform is The Great Socialist Evil, I know better than to think that people who don’t have health insurance are slackers, lazy bums who don’t bother with insurance because they figure the county hospital will take care of them if they become ill. The people I know most often pay for their health care out of their own pocket, paying more for that care because of the way the insurance companies have rigged things up so that the uninsured help make up for the profits that health care providers might have lost from the insured. And those people forego things like mammograms and prostate screenings and even the most basic dental care not because they don’t care about those things but because they cannot afford them.

I know artists who feel they have to have insurance in case something truly devastating happens, but their only affordable choice is a plan with a really high deductible, meaning that all the minor stuff isn’t covered. It comes down to going in for a mammogram or paying the electric bill.

To all those angry conservatives who are dead set against reform, I say, “Think it can’t happen to you? Think that, because you have insurance and pay your premiums and stay away from The Great Unwashed, you’ll never wish things were different ?  Do you think that? “

Then take a look at this. Maybe your insurance premiums aren’t protecting you quite as fully as you think they are: