President Obama is coming to Bozeman on Friday. Schedule conflicts are going to mean that we probably won't get to go see him, but I am going to be nervous all week about the people who are going to be able to show up. I like to think of my neighbors as tolerant, reasonable people, and I don't want to be proven wrong in the national spotlight. Unfortunately, given that event info is being spread in the right-wing blogosphere faster than forgeries of Obama's birth certificate, I am not hopeful that the best of Big Sky Country is going to be on display.
A couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to Max Baucus' Bozeman office. I was there to give his staff some information from MomsRising.org about healthcare. My visit happened to coincide with the first of what have now become regular demonstrations in front of that office by the Tea Party crowd, waving their signs about "socialism" and "government" healthcare. It was infuriating. As I was outnumbered 50 to 1, I restrained myself, but I came away with this: If more than 5 percent of the people at that demonstration even had a passport--much less had been outside the country long enough to have any personal knowledge about "socialism" and other "foreign" healthcare systems--I'll eat my beret. And that of my socialism-loving husband.
What's getting lost in all this insanity is that real people--people I know, even, and probably people you know as well--are suffering because of the current system. And, as Southern Beale writes in an incredibly moving post, Sarah Palin's "death panels" are already here. It's just that they're staffed by insurance company executives more interested in profit than people.
It's disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst for anti-reform "protestors" to pretend that our current system doesn't already have faceless bureaucrats between me and my doctor. They're there every time a cancer patient has to wait to start his treatment because they put a hold on his chemo so that the company go through his policy line by line, looking for any reason they can find to drop his coverage. They're there when a woman gets 48 hours--maximum--to stay in the hospital after she gives birth. They're there when a patient is released early after major abdominal surgery, only to have to be readmitted again and again because his healing isn't progressing as it should at home. Not to mention when that patient acquires MRSA at the emergency room where he has to go because he probably shouldn't have been released in the first place.
I'll take the faceless bureaucrat who works for me, thank you very much.