Via Shakesville comes this heartbreaking, infuriating story written by a military mom for the Huffington Post: McCain Emphasizes Concern for Veterans...So Just What Has He Done About Walter Reed? Just see if you're able to keep the tears out of your eyes as you read about her experiences trying to get medical care for her young son with cancer at Walter Reed as an army dependent:
Though I repeatedly requested it, the powers that be would not allow me
to take my son to a children's hospital for the much more intense
chemotherapy he now needed to combat the spreading cancer. As long as
we lived near a military treatment facility, they said, his care had to
be conducted there. As weeks passed, his general health deteriorated so
much that he could no longer even attend school, his skin grayed and he
sat limp most of the day. It became clear that staying at Walter Reed
was the same as giving my son a death sentence.
As Melissa says, "...when you hear Republicans say that government-sponsored healthcare doesn't work, it's because they refuse to properly fund it. They set it up to fail, because successful government-sponsored healthcare undermines their platform, and being right is more important than saving children's lives."
And keep in mind that this woman--as horrible a situation as she found herself in--is still better off than the millions of Americans with no health coverage at all
Let's also talk about the majority of Americans, who have insurance but it's crappy and inadequate and designed to prevent people from getting the care they need (because caring for people cuts into profits) rather than facilitating it.
Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. I recently talked with a women who is fighting breast cancer with every fiber of her being. She has two young children, and her husband has a good job with (supposedly) good insurance. When she went in to have one of her first chemo treatments (which had to be very specifically timed to coincide with a certain part of her menstrual cycle), she was told that she couldn't begin the treatment that day because her insurance company had not yet approved her for it. Never mind that not starting that day would mean a treatment delay of a minimum of 28 days. Never mind that all we hear, day in and day out, is that early treatment is key to beating cancer.
Never mind that bureaucratic hassles like what this woman experienced with her market-based healthcare stand in the way of people receiving care every single day.
Sarah Palin in the debate last night spent a few of her non-Maverick, non-Alaska sentences trying to scare the pants off of us by invoking that great spectre of socialized medicine, the government bureaucrat. You know what? I'll take the government bureaucrat who, at the very least, is supposed to be working for me, over the insurance company bureaucrat whom I know is working primarily to protect the bottom line and his company's profits.
Our system now--despite what John McCain and Sarah Palin would have us believe--is hardly unfettered and free, at least for those of us, most of us, who cannot afford really excellent insurance or who haven't been covered by government-sponsored healthcare for the entirety of our adult lives. As Ezra Klein put it recently:
Spoken like a man who, on the one hand, has never used an HMO, and on
the other, has never been off government health care a day in his life,
and is healthy enough to run for president at 72.
Government healthcare? I'll have what he's having.
