And Don't Punish the Sick

Sometimes, the debate over health care reform gets personal. Like two weeks ago, when my oldest daughter ended up in the emergency room to replace fluids after a raging flare-up of ulcerative colitis. She had lost eight pounds in just a few weeks, and was so weak she could barely walk.

Colitis is a debilitating autoimmune disorder that frequently hits between the ages of 15 and 30 (she was in her mid 20s), or later in life at 50 to 70. It is not a lifestyle-induced disease so common to today’s fat and bloated Americans who stuff themselves with McDonald’s non-food and KFC’s artery clogging crapola.

Kate has always eaten nutritiously, and has never been overweight. She is simply the victim of a bad gene pool that afflicts my father’s side of the family, where Type 1 diabetes (another autoimmune disorder) is rampant.

Kate is a bright girl with a gift for math. She has a master’s degree in statistics, and is working toward a second master’s in real estate finance. She loves her job as a risk analyst at Freddie Mac, which comes with good health insurance.

But what happens if she loses that job, either due to her illness, or to the vagaries of the marketplace? She would be uninsurable if she had to buy an individual policy. If she did manage to find a health insurer that would accept her, decent coverage would be unaffordable.

And so we have the Catch-22 of our broken, illogical, heartless system of reliance on employer-based, private-enterprise health insurance, a vestige of World War II wage controls that no longer serves our society.

If Kate lived anywhere else in the world, her health and well-being would not be tied to her job. If her illness prevented her from working, she would still have access to affordable medical treatment. Any decent society provides this, at the least.

This is why I’m so pissed off at Barack Obama and his constant caving in to the Right Wing Fox Nuts. He has allowed the Plutocrats to frame the agenda, starting with his “health care reform” proposal that offers a leg up to a paltry few who fall through the cracks.

The 20-somethings who can’t find work can remain on their parents’ plan, and those with pre-existing conditions can’t be dropped (but nothing stops the insurers from jacking up rates to the point where the chronically ill can’t afford them.) I suppose this is a small measure of progress compared to what we have now.

But what rankles the the Tea Baggers, the Plutocrats, AND us Progressives is the mandate to buy a faulty for-profit product that is overpriced and which weasles out of its contractual obligations to pay whenever the bills come due.