My Dad worked hard his entire life, helping to put me and my sisters through college. But a stroke left him paralyzed on one side of his body, unable to speak and barely able to walk let alone continue to work. The insurance company refused to pay for the necessary speech therapy that might have helped my Dad talk again.
So I understood the pain of a woman who attended a town hall meeting hosted by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
As you’ll see in the video she pleads with Coburn to help her husband, who she says suffers from traumatic brain injury. It’s difficult to listen to her words amidst the sobbing, but it is clear that her husband’s insurance company has denied him some type of coverage.
The senator, who is also a physician, tells her, “Yeah, we’ll help. The first thing we’ll see what we can do individually to help you through our office. But the other thing that’s missing in this debate is us, as neighbors, helping people that need our help. The idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement . . . ”
So he both told her that the government isn’t the answer and invited her to his government office. That’s confusing enough, but what’s more perplexing is that Coburn seems to be telling the woman to go beg her neighbors for help.
Neighbors might be able to bring that weeping woman a casserole or maybe even press a few dollars into her hand. But neighbors most likely wouldn’t be able to provide her husband with the proper rehabilitation, no more than I could have given to my Dad. And why presume that the neighbors are in a better position than she is? Nearly 50 million American citizens don’t have health insurance. Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released in June by the American Journal of Medicine. One aspect of the health debate that is under-discussed has been how the people who seem fine with the status quo actually are carrying an unseen load — they’re paying for the doctor and hospital visits of the people who don’t have insurance. It’s not some faceless corporation, or some accounting write-off but dollars out of the pockets of regular working families. According to a Families USA report released earlier this summer, a regular family with health insurance pays an additional $1,000 annually in premiums to recompense for health care for those without coverage. An individual with private coverage also pays an additional $370 a year. The experts who study the system call it cost-shifting. All the uninsured sick people need to know is that they won’t be turned away from the emergency room; all the working insurance card-carrying population may know, or at least think about, is that their out-of-pocket costs are going up. People are drowning under mounting health care costs and a faltering economy. Is it the government’s job to make things better?
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