Life and Death: The Battle for Health Care Reform
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
While on Capitol Hill the legions of well-fed and well-heeled lobbyists worked feverishly to emasculate health care reform, a few hundred miles away in southwestern Virginia, about 14,000 people crowded into the Wise County Fairgrounds, their presence there an indictment of our mercenary medical system.
The crowd in Wise County was there for a chance to receive free medical and dental care from about 1,400 volunteer medical workers, including doctors, dentists, and nurses. The record crowd started arriving before 5:00 a.m. Some camped out in order to be first in line. “We are working taxpaying jobs, paying taxes, and we can’t get insurance because we make $6.55 an hour,” said Laura Head, 32, of Rogersville, Tenn., the first person in line Friday for the first day of the Remote Area Medical clinic, an annual three-day event offering free medical care. The story was reported by Debra McCown of the Bristol Herald Courier.
The medical clinic is similar to those organized to deliver care to people in Third World countries. It is a stark reminder of the presence of a Third World right here in the United States represented by the nearly 50 million people who lack medical insurance.
“We’ve never had the traffic problem that we had this morning,” said Teresa Gardner, executive director of Health Wagon, the local organization that organizes the event. She said she knows of “a young woman, 19 or 20 years old, who is dying of cervical cancer for the simple reason that she didn’t have the money for follow-up care after an abnormal screening result.” There are various estimates of the number of people who die each year because of lack of access to health care, with one conservative estimate putting the annual figure at 18,000. That’s more than six times the number of people who died on 9-11. It is criminal.
Meanwhile, in Congress, lobbyists and Senators close to the insurance industry worked to strip out key provisions from the reform bill, including a government run public option, which would compete with private insurers. Obscene amounts of money came to the coffers of politicians thanks to the medical-industrial complex. Many of them are Republicans but some are “Blue Dog” (conservative) Democrats who have been colluding with the Republicans to dilute any reform bill.
If the Senate Finance Committee’s watered down version of the bill is adopted rather than the more progressive House version, it would do little to cure the massive problems that ail our medical system. It would be scarcely worth sacrificing real health reform on the altar of bipartisanship. Thus it is crucial that Senators work to strengthen the bill when it comes to the floor and that the House hang tough in the conference committee that will attempt to reconcile the two versions of the legislation. No legislation is better than one which does not contain a public option or which is paid for by the middle class rather than the plutocrats who have made out like bandits for over the last two decades.
The problems health care reform needs to address represent those seen in Wise County multiplied many times over. Appalachia, the mountainous region where Wise County is located, is plagued by low income, high unemployment, and myriad social problems; but there are a thousand Wise counties from Maine to California, in big cities, small towns, and rural areas.
Of all groups, Latinos have the lowest percentage of medically insured. If the nearly unanimous GOP opposition to Sonia Sotomayor was a slap in the face of Latinos, Republican obstructionism on health care reform is playing with our very lives.
