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Action on Health Care Reform
Originally published in E-Leaven, July 30, 2009, Issue 13
by John F. Kane

If you’re like me, you are pretty overwhelmed by all the information and opinion that the news media and e-mails from various groups and the views of various columnists and bloggers are throwing at you about the current health care reform debate and about current proposals going through both House and Senate.

I suspect that some of this is unavoidable – many different ideas are being hashed around in various congressional committees and the media are trying to report on a messy process. (If you’ve been involved in major committee work of some sort, you know how messy it can get.) But I also suspect – part of my distrust of Congress and even more of the big money interests at work to get or keep their big piece of this huge health care pie – that much of the confusion is being deliberately caused. It’s one of the ways “they” (the big money folks and their lackeys) work to make us apathetic. They know there is huge sentiment for change and real reform out there in the country, so they are working to deflate that sentiment.

Which leads to the question, where do you go to get information you can trust and recommendations for action that you feel are reliable? I’m not sure I really have the answer to that question, but I want to pass on a recent e-mail from NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby in Washington that was started by and is underwritten by various groups of Catholic nuns. No need to read further if you already receive their mailings. But if you don’t, I’d urge you to read on and consider the action they recommend.

(By the way, they write with a great sense of urgency about action this week – hope you get this soon enough. But I’ve also read that it’s unlikely that the crucial bill will get out of committee this week in part because of deliberate obstructionist efforts to slow down the process -- another part of the effort to make people confused and apathetic… and so to kill meaningful reform.)

Here’s what NETWORK had to say (and you can find more about this by going to their website, www.networklobby.org, and clicking on the first item under “Action Alerts” on the right hand side of their homepage):

  1. This week is crucial for getting House members to support HR 3200 – America’s Affordable Health Choices Act.
  2. Please call AND e-mail your representative this week and urge him/her to support HR 3200.
  3. You can call Congress via a toll-free number (1-888- 797-8717) that is being paid for by the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church.
  4. You can e-mail by going to the NETWORK website indicated above and clicking on the health care item under Action Alerts– there you’ll find a form e-mail already written which you can send as is or adapt as you wish.

Network gives some of the highlights of HR 3200 as it currently is shaped (or was yesterday.) The highlights that they recommend we work for:

Finally, let me add my own two cents, though I remind you that I began this article by admitting that I’m confused.

I think there are two crucial ideas or perspectives.

The first is the principle that good health care is a fundamental human right. People say that, but then the debate gets down to “WHAT REALLY COUNTS” – which is money. We must really keep insisting in all that we think and say (to our Congresspersons, to our neighbors, to the editors of the news…) that good health care is a fundamental human right, not some item that is possible only if “it’s affordable” (which in effect means that the big interests get their cut and as many of us as possible get what’s left over). It’s a right – as much as breathing clean air, having one’s gender and race respected, having food and shelter, not being mugged or murdered… It’s what goes with being born and human. And sure, we have to struggle out how to organize and pay for it, but that becomes doable when we really think of good health care as a basic human right. Whereas the economic battle (where the biggies never lose) becomes central when talk about rights is just rhetoric to hide economic realities.

The second is the idea that there must be a public health care option for all. The clever opponents of this and their confused/ignorant/fundamentalist followers continually repeat their mantra about opposing “socialized medicine.” The reality for anyone willing to think a minute is that all of our present medicine is socialized – just count the ways. Most obvious is Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor and government plans for government employees (like congresspeople, the military, etc.). Increasingly obvious is the fact that all our rates go up when more and more people without any insurance use emergency rooms or defer care until it’s really expensive, etc. We all pay because the system simply passes its costs onto the rest of us – which is a social or socialized solution that’s been going on for years to take care of the uninsured. And finally the whole idea of insurance is “socialized” – at its essence, and despite efforts by insurers to narrow their risk pool and increase their profits, insurance is a social group (whoever is signed on with the insurance company) spreading risk and cost out over a large number of people so that in the end the healthy pay for the times when some of us get unhealthy. And in addition to all this evidence that all US health care is already “socialized,” there is very good data (reliable, consistent, despite endless lies told by opponents) that when countries (like most of the rest of the developed world) have explicitly public (“socialized”) health care, they pay much less and have better health than our non-explicit, private and for profit “socialized” systems.

 

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