WHEN HEALTH CARE REFORM HITS HOME
66PERSONAL SIDE OF HEALTH CARE
IGNORE HEALTHCARE REFORM, UNLESS IT’S YOURS
By Mark Scheinbaum
BROOKLYN, NY (23 OCT. 2009) --I wonder if a national health plan bordering on socialism would be a slam dunk if Liberal democrats such as the late Ted Kennedy had spun the issue so that departed Carolina conservative Senate icons such as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond could make it a “populist” cause.
“Ahem, Ahem now, “ the power structure of the current Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” might tell the folks of mythical Missitucky, “We don’t want none of that there pinko commie national health care, just the same darned health and medical protection them fat cats we bailed out on Wall Street all have for their young’uns and kin.”
It seems as if serious health reform is someone else’s problem, someone else’s issue, someone else’s tragedy until it is yours.
Charity from a friend puts me in a brownstone in the upscale Park Slope section of Brooklyn to recuperate from prostate cancer surgery this week at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Deficient medical insurance such as mine in New Mexico where $700 plus a month buys you perhaps a $10,000 deductible and $3,000 and 50% co-pay when you are still three years too young for Medicare, hits you squarely in the face with health choices.
Do what I did in a state where there was no bariatric surgeon certified in the state to perform weight loss surgery which was mandatory precursor to cancer surgery; and no Davinci laproscopic surgery machine until months after my diagnosis.
Take your chances, literally allow “watchful waiting” with at least two tumors, or go on “hormone” therapy with daily pills and quarterly $1,900 shots. Ask nine urologists in two countries where they would go with the same cancer and have eight of them tell you Sloan Kettering, and the ninth would “Go to M.D. Anderson in Houston unless I had more time and I’d go to New York to Sloan Kettering.”
So with a wife of 40-plus years who takes “for better or worse” seriously and the real likelihood of literally losing the ranch because my insurer changed my New York treatment from in network to “out of network” coverage when a new machine was unveiled in Albuquerque after I had already embarked on a course of treatment in New York, we go forward.
I think I will be able to pay my bills after working and scrimping since age 14 starting as a copy boy at the New York World-Telegram and Sun. I also think paying my bills will remove any remaining retirement funds, max out all credit cards, and with the economic downturn actually flirt with foreclosure and/or bankruptcy unless things pick up. I am not meeting my financial obligations to an elderly mom, and not helping out struggling kids and grandkids. C’est la vie.
Years ago when the Op Ed page of the New York Times published a dispatch I wrote from Cuba, I remarked to friends that Cuban residents could not understand parents needing to pay for child care or health care in order to be secure in a job. Nothing has changed except millions of Americans have lost their homes because other Americans believe promoters who tell them it’s no one else’s worry if a mom has to miss work or take an extra job to pay for a kid’s ER bill after a soccer injury.
In Park Slope a metal canister with much less than a pound of coffee is $14.99. Across from MethodistHospital two burgers at Five Guys and a
Coke are $14.10. The small Breakstone's cottage cheese at Steve’s discount supermarket is more than four bucks.
And through it all New Yorkers, New Mexicans and everyone in between pay hundreds or thousands per month for coverage they pray they will never need.
The pain after radical prostate surgery is like being in a knife fight which you lost. One gains a new respect for drug addicts popping pain pills. But after four days the pain has subsided and thoughts of “did they get it all?,” recovery, resumed work, and facing the bills evolve to the forefront of one’s personal health care journey.
Is it really a luxury to guarantee a basic safety net for all Americans? Does Boeing really and truly play on a level playing field with Airbus Industrie when airlines bid on planes? Boeing’s planes include benefits packages negotiated with, for, and by working people. Airbus low balls prices in a work environment subsidized by half of the taxpayers of Western Europe.
As I think of this health care debate, I wonder if some of the captains of Wall Street now scorned, the Guggenheims or an Admiral Josephthal would be very proud of workers’ treatments. Cutting my investment teeth at the end of the golden era of Josephthal & Co., I remember when true leaders such as Michael DeMarco Sr. and Raymond Mando took care of employees.
Workers who helped the firm survive the Great Depression had a job with benefits for life. Period.
As a young limited partner and director I learned of at least two cases when employees’ children were accepted to medical school and the firm proudly paid their tuitions.
A coronary attack which killed a worker resulted in $900+ complete physical exams for all employees paid for by the firm.
Thanksgiving did not only mean a fresh turkey but a choice of an
Empire Kosher Turkey for Jewish workers. I won’t even get into the gold plated Seth Thomas mantel clocks on corporate anniversaries.
Yup, a single payer national universal health care system is pretty bad policy. Except when it hits home.
Brooklyn-born Mark Scheinbaum, former UPI newsman is managing director of LF-Financial, LLC and lives in Angel Fire, New Mexico.
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Comments
well stated..basically ther Ponzi scheme aspect of insurance....i don think workers should be forced to pay a mandatory premium...I think federal waste should be cut and abasic VA style benefit paid for by the entire nation.
Having just yesterday celebrated my 83rd birthday with no health problems (except for broken ribs a couple of yeyars ago from a bike spill), I feel lucky - - and even clever for using food suppliments of 50 or 60 of those years. So now I figure that what is really needed is health care, not medical insurance. The difference? Health is taking care of your own body by eating right and doing productive exercise (bike riding to post office market, etc). Don't figure that years of inactivity can be overcome by a magic pill today (regardless of what the ads say). And be curious - such helps the mind to function. And don't depend on a government to save you. When I was in the big war, I was impressed that the government wasn't there to save me; I got a rifle because I was expected to save the govenment.
We thank you and my dad's generation for saving our nation once, perhaps your sage wisdom will save us again!
Hope that you are feeling well enough to raise a leetle dust when you kick, Mr Biz. Your point is well taken. I cannot understand why we were not able to put in a simple pgm back when Hillary Care tried to reinvent the wheel- and now here we are reinventing another wheel when we could take lessons from countries where their system is in place and so move forward more quickly. My Mom's medicare deductible for hosp admission just went up from 50 to $250 so I can see where the "savings" in the new pgm are coming from....hope the politicos can "git 'er done" soon instead of talking it all into the dirt. Get well soon.
walked 22 blks tdy..much more energy and much less pain.mny thx
Problem is that it's not just a "single payer national universal health care system" being shoved down our throats.
It's a POLITICALLY run system by which people expect to get top-quality health care (as a sort of perverted vision of "civil rights") without - they think - paying for it.
Not gonna happen. The advocates of the "public option" seem to be blanking out on Friedman's (and Heinlein's) observation that "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."
TANSTAAFL.
Like it or not, you've got to pay for it, and when you put the power and authority to run "the health care system" into the hands of popularity contest winners (career politicians) and government bureaucrats, they WILL make you pay.
In the process, they'll screw up massively.
What's that old saying? "Politicians are like rats. What they take for themselves is nothing compared to the damage they do in getting it."
The presently perceived problems with "the health care system" in these United States - which is damned surely not a "system" at all - are entirely the result of government intervention in the health care marketplace to begin with.
That is a categorical statement, and I don't voice categorical statements unless I'm utterly certain of their veracity. Disengage your "government-as-Santa-Claus" stupidity, lock in on sanity and honesty, and examine the history of government screwing-around with medicine in America (and with the economy as a whole), and you'll see that this "Inconvenient Truth" cannot be escaped.
The sources of information supporting this truth are readily available online, and if you want links I can provide.
Those of you who want "free healthcare" aren't interested in facts that show up the witlessness of your fantasies, and those of you who understand how things really work - and how to get real solutions - have almost certainly found these information resources for yourselves.
Before concluding, let me offer one more observation, uttered by economist Frederic Bastiat when he was trying to deal with the first crop of socialists ever to slime out into public, back in 1850:
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I'll accept the Nobel Peace Prize any time those fascists in Oslo want to steer it my way.
I've certainly done more - right here, right now - to earn it than either Algore or Barry Soetoro.
NYT today had a glimpse of what it takes to oreally really really get top care, and the evolution of M D Anderson CAncer Hospital in Houston...wonder what percentage of Americans have access to this level of care?
MikeNV says:
2 months ago
The problem with Health Insurance is it is an exclusive club available only to those who have no illness. As the concept is currently implemented it's not Health Insurance at all... it's Corporate Budgeting where each person is a number based on profitability. And the Administrative costs are so far out of Whack a true "Insurance" plan would never work.
There needs to be a real insurance option where you are safe guarding against catastrophic financial loss. As you have stated in your own case insurance is really not available to you.
There is a built in disincentive to create efficiencies in the marketplace. There are two reasons for this:
1. People are paying over $1,000 in many cases so they feel they need to get value out of that investment so they go to the Doctor when they don't need to. They have insurance so they use it.
2. Existing laws allow Insurance companies to run non-competitive monopolies driving out the competition which would lead to lower costs. Insurance is a real cash cow. Seriously. I know of a retired health insurance executive that is pulling $5 million a year to be retired.
Mandating coverage is going to really hurt people. For example in your case forcing you to pay over a $1,000 a month for coverage that doesn't cover anything won't help you. That's insane. The Government is horribly inefficient yet they are designing a program?
If you want efficiency you remove the monopolies, you regulate the cheats, and you open the doors to competition.
We live in a country that can provide $20 percent of it's budget to war causes but can not figure out a solution to care for citizens?