Regional
(2009-09-07)
Listen Now:
GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
Congress goes back to work tomorrow after its members heard an earful about overhauling health care from their constituents during the August recess. After a summer of rhetoric, KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel hopes the real debate will begin.
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"Obama lies and Grandma dies." I overheard these words a few days ago as I pushed my cart by a small group of nicely-dressed older women who'd gathered in front of the lettuce display at the supermarket. After these words were intoned, the rest of the group nodded their heads in assent.
That's when I knew that meaningful healthcare reform has been forced once again on the ropes by big lies, told and retold at volumes amplified by megaphones of money. Nobody has proposed anything like the death squads that would give the thumbs-down to frail Grandma or to developmentally challenged Trig. But such accusations are being flung so stridently at every opportunity, in every medium and venue, that there is no room for dialog about how to get people the healthcare that they really need.
Huge financial interests, like the health insurance companies, cynically warn that getting the government more involved in healthcare will destroy our freedom to pay too much for too little. The not-so-loyal political opposition has seized the opportunity to prove that the current administration is really just a bunch of ultra-liberals whose main goal is to grow government at the expense of everything else because, well, that's what they do.
And the fringe, heard incessantly on so many talk-shows, has portrayed the current attempt to fix a system that everybody knows is both broke and broken, as a sort of Armageddon, a culture war of good versus evil, of virtuous Christians versus godless, heartless murderers of the aged and unborn.
This is nuts. But I do understand the fear of changing things, especially on the part older people. Medicare has been one of our most successful social programs--a government program, I might add. Though there are lots of holes in the system, thanks to Medicare, the one group in this country that can count on having health insurance (besides everybody who's ever served in Congress) is the over-65 crowd. But, in order to serve some of the huge uninsured chunk of the younger population, the outrageous cost of Medicare will have to be reined in. If this were done wisely, trimming unnecessary and expensive testing and therapies, old folks could actually get better, more comprehensive care for less money.
However, it's all been reduced to slogans like the one I heard at the grocery store. Mr. Obama appears to be getting the same sort of comeuppance that Bill and Hillary Clinton received on the last go-round from Harry and Louise. In a series of well-crafted commercials this fictitious elderly couple managed to get their hands wrapped around the throats of anyone attempting to say something sensible about reforming healthcare.
I'd like nothing better than to see reason and civility and a true concern for the public good win out; and to get a glimmer of a vision of how we, as a nation, will find a way out of the nightmare that we call, by default, a healthcare system. So, I beg every one of you to do what you can to prepare the soil for real reform, starting with respectful listening and speaking.
If we don't fix things, sooner or later Grandma really will die, following in the wake of so many of her poor and even her middle class children and grandchildren who perished for lack of decent healthcare.
© Copyright 2012, KUNC
