Tag Archives: health care
Religio: taking careful account
Well, a trip to the emergency room over the holidays interrupted my train of thought. I’m most grateful to a young cardiologist who treated me at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. As we agreed that I should have a heart catheterization, he remarked gruffly, “You’ll be OK. You’re a healthy guy.” As it turned out, he was more than right. The catheterization turned up no blockages or other problems with my heart—not that hypertension isn’t a problem
—thanks Dr. Ammar! You’re a mensch.
Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops are seeking again to build sympathy for their continued effort to suppress women’s reproductive choices and impose catholic teaching on all employees of catholic institutions, whether they are catholics or not. Rich Lowry, writing in this week’s Time harangues us all in a piece that features a cartoon effigy of the president as Henry VIII, to view the good bishops as an oppressed religious minority and the president as their oppressor.
But the president may have outfoxed the proud prelates this time by removing the birth control mandate from their shoulders and placing it on the shoulders of insurance companies. The bishops are crying foul, as should be expected from a group of privileged citizens who have long been able to claim benefit of clergy in ways that defy rational analysis. Witness their attempt to blame the sexual abuse of thousands of catholic children on American culture—I wonder how that fits in Ireland and Holland—and their casuistic claim that catholic universities are not religious organizations when the issue is grant money.
plus ca change
While the spinners parse President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly according to the foreign policy clichés of the moment, it’s at least interesting to wonder if any US president can effect any change in foreign affairs that is more than symbolic, or alter the ideologies of the nation’s military and intelligence agencies or change their behavior. I had planned to write something about this, but Gary Wills has written something more authoritative than anything I could have said, in the New York Review of Books.
“A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets,” Wills writes.
He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.
This perhaps explains why President Obama’s campaign promises to dismantle criminal enterprises within the national defense establishment are likely to remain unfulfilled. Read the entire Wills essay here.
I’m now wondering if the new direction that those of us who ardently supported the President when he ran for office hoped for was ever more than a pipe dream that ended when it was found that AIG and certain banking institutions were “too big to fail.” It now appears that the banking industry with its rightist ideology will be too big for government to reign in, though that really means that there is so much interdependence between the interests and power bases of Wall Street bankers and those of key legislators that serious regulation of capitalist excess is impossible. And it now appears that certain cartels, the medical-industrial complex and the national defense cartel, with their rightist ideologies, have become so powerful that they cannot be successfully opposed.
The Republican party may be in disarray, but the ideological right is not only alive and well but also very much in control.
opposition to extraordinary needs
I’ve just read a powerful op-ed piece in the Arizona Daily Star in support of the President’s program of health care reform. It’s a good, strong piece full of passionate thinking and based in personal experience. The writer is Sarah Garrecht Gassen, the daughter of a friend and co-parishioner here in St. Louis. The heart of it is the author’s experience trying to find health insurance in light of the fact that she has used a prosthetic leg since she was three years old.
Gassen’s concern in this piece is primarily with reform of the insurance system, particularly with changing the familiar practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions; though her anger with people who are willing to ignore “the failings of our existing health-care system because someone somewhere told them President Obama is a socialist or some such nonsense” extends beyond that one set of issues. I had thought this was relatively safe territory, believing that the clear middle-class interest in insurance reform would ensure the success of this part of the President’s program. But I fear I was wrong.
The comment thread following Gassen’s piece is filled with attacks on her and her ideas. Many of them are just flaming, but not all. One merely observes sarcastically,
Sorry about your leg Sarah. I had a similar problem when I tried to get auto insurance the day after I wrecked my car.
Damn insurance companies.
Here’s another, this one a serious ad hominem:
Sarah is a liberal journalist with no background or expertise in health care. Yet she has the pulpit and the ink to spew her opinions. She is so biased her pieces abound in poor judgement, but she can’t really help herself. This is what is frightening about these people. Be afraid, be very afraid.
But the most dismaying comment comes from a person who speaks without apparent malice—I give it entire.
I am very sorry for your prosthetic leg situation.
However, I am tired of people such as myself on the right being accused of fear mongering.
If you want truth, the truth is much of what you hear from the right is the end result of much thought about how a government health care system will affect the country. We are not stupid as some might think and we have the right to our opinions just as much as any person on the left. I may not agree with the left, but I don’t accuse them of being non-thinkers.
Another thing I am tired of is that people with extraordinary needs are being used to set the precedent for why we need nationalized health care.
Truth be told, those people are a small percentage and I don’t think it is right to turn the entire health care system over onto its’ belly because of the few.
I have concern about the ever-increasing “me me me” mentality in this country…”the government should pay for this, the government should pay for that.” To heck with the entitlement mentality.
Finally, there are a number of very charitable organizations from churches to doctors and hospitals whose sole purpose is to assist those who need it
It’s been my thought that the struggle for consensus on health care involved persuading independent voters, those who voted for Obama in the general election because of perceived economic interest, that health care reform would benefit them, particularly that requiring insurance companies to cover everyone for a reasonable cost would benefit them.
It’s this thought that I am re-examining. I have no idea how representative the comments to Sarah Gassen’s op-ed may be of the opposition to health care reform, but if they are broadly representative I’m more worried than I was. When people who seem rational can characterize their fellow citizens who would simply like to be able to buy health insurance for a reasonable cost and be covered for their pre-existing conditions, as deadbeats possessed of an entitlement mentality, we’ve hit a new low, indeed.