Oh for the love of mercy! I thought this new administration was supposed to be against torture. Will this health care debate never end?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to minimize waterboarding. But I’m at the point where pretending we’re drowning people reminds me an awful lot of pretending that we care whether they are dying for want of a doctor. And way more people do die from this pretense — tens of thousands more.
I contend that living in a system where a person can have a lump in his or her armpit, two part-time jobs to put food on the table, and no access to health care because he or she actually makes his or her own money and consequently doesn’t qualify for assistance is terrorizing.
Want to discuss bone chilling panic? That lump isn’t in some adult’s armpit; it’s in their kid’s!
Maybe that’s how we’ll get universal access to health care in this backward country of ours — file suit under the Geneva conventions prohibiting torture. According to the United Nations, the definition of torture is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” and then it goes on to list the reasons including “the sadistic gratification of the torturer.” But in the case of our country it’s for financial gain.
Severe emotional anguish: That’s what the tens of thousands of folks who die without health care in this country experience before they expire. And many more people suffer with fears who don’t actually die of their untreated illness. They are just petrified that they’ll lose their job or their home if they don’t go to work because they are sick. So they go to work, and in some form of poetic nightmarish justice, they run the risk of making other people sick, too, possibly even legislators, drug company officials or insurance magnates. Oh, but those folks have access to health care — so disease may spread — but the torture is contained.
Or is it?
C’mon, even if you have health care you must be feeling tortured by now. This seemingly endless and condescending debate makes me feel like I’m lying on a medieval rack and Congress is just turning the lever by degrees. At least it doesn’t even hurt anymore. It did at first. Especially when nice folks would call me or e-mail me and say, “What can we do to get single payer like they have in the entire civilized world that lives longer and pays less for health care ?” I’d rock my head and avoid the conversation. I felt that was the kind way to treat people who still had hope that Congress wouldn’t simply toy with them.
What I wanted to say was, “You want to know what we can do? Well, how much money do you have? And how often are you entertained in the White House or at the Capitol?” But I bit my lip. I didn’t want to discourage them from at least trying. And anyway, I’m not a Democrat and I’m sure they would have dismissed me as that woman who supports third-party politics because she “claims” that mainstream politicians are in bed up to their nightcaps with the big multi-national corporations that get them elected.
So when the Huffington Post reported this week that “Billy Tauzin, the CEO of the pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA, stopped by the White House 11 times,” including a meeting with the president himself” — and then went on to list, “Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, came to the White House on eight occasions, usually for meetings with high-ranking officials. As did the heads of Kaiser Health Plans, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the American Hospital Association as well as several major health care industry lobbyists,” you can imagine my complete and total lack of surprise.
But please for the love of all things humanitarian, Congress and Mr. President, pick one form of torture — death by unknown illness or the disdainful rhetorical rack — but not both! Especially now that we know you lack the guts to stop the insurance companies from torturing the working stiff who has no coverage, even though that torture ends in death.
Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the author of “Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States.” She may be reached at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.