My dad loves the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, especially when comedian Bill Engvall talks about people he wants to hand a “Here’s Your Sign” notice for stupidity.
As the health care debate escalates, I’m reminded of Engvall.
There are a lot of people talking about health care with zero knowledge of their subject matter. And yet, we hand them a national microphone to add to the ambiguity and visceral partisanship that’s driving the conversation into the ground.
This “national dialogue” is wrapped so tightly in strings that it has begun to look like a marionette; jerkily moving across the stage with no one quite sure who’s pulling what and in what direction.
Before I moved east, I worked in a Medicaid group serving eight states and 35 clinics.
That’s a lot of children now able to live healthier lives. However, bound by the limitations of the overall health care world, I found myself constantly coming up against the wall of the inequities in the system.
For every child seen, we ignored at least four uninsured adults in desperate need of help because the Medicaid system did not cover services for them. The choice left to the doctor was either to provide free care, which after a while makes it difficult to pay bills, or tell the patients to wait until whatever illness affecting them was bad enough to visit the emergency room.
The cost of ER treatment is 75 times more expensive than primary care visits. Typically, the taxpayer then goes on to absorb these costs.
Many medical professionals say the most important part of their oath is, “Do No Harm.” Yet, these are the same professionals who encourage ER visits even though they know they’re adding to the health care problem. Thus, the cycle continues where the standard of care is just enough not to kill too many people and really attract more attention to the problem.
More than 45 million people are uninsured or worse — barely insured.
For those unfamiliar with the term “near poor,” the near poor are those beyond Medicaid’s cutoff of 100 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL). In 2009, the FPL for a family of four is $22,050. For one person, it’s a mere $10,830.
With the economic downtown, the near poor are fast becoming a growing group of former middle to low-middle class Americans who are consequently joining the ranks of the barely insured and uninsured.
The estimated $1.6 trillion that President Obama wants to use to fix our failing health care system over the next 10 years is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the continuing long-term costs that will eventually bankrupt the country in about the same period of time.
Who needs Wall Street’s incompetence when Main Street is self-destructing itself because of a refusal to think long term? Think about that the next time you hear about the health care debate.
And, something else to think about — Medicaid cuts off at 18. Imagine if that person’s parents also lost their insurance. In this down economy, it seems likely then that there are a few people sitting next to you in class who might be uninsured.
Wouldn’t that be exciting if that person got H1N1 or mono and were told they had to wait until they were really sick before they could be treated?
Here’s your sign.
Lindsay is a Spears continuing student in business living in Washington D.C. She received her B.A. in political science in 2006 at OSU.
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