Pre Vote Thoughts
I know so many of my friends are opposed to this health care bill and I don't want to scold anybody about being on the wrong side of history, like the anti-New Dealers in the time of FDR, or the anti-Civil Rights Act and anti-Medicare folks in the time of LBJ. As much as I personally believe that in the richest country in the world, healthcare should be a right, not a privilege, I won't even bother to take that stand today.
Instead, I'll simply point to Gail Collins who wrote in the New York Times on Saturday that "If it passes, the short-term political consequences are unknowable but in 10 years people will look back in amazement that we once lived in a time when Americans couldn't get health care coverage if they were sick, when insurance companies could cut off your benefits for being sick, and when run-of-the-mill serious illnesses routinely destroyed families' financial security." I have to hope, based on watching my brother Steve's healthcare odyssey unfold, that families will not have to go through this anymore.
For those who don't know him, Steve was an influential rock 'n' roll DJ (sounds oxymoronic, I realize, if you are not from the music world, but trust me, it was a big business, and in the time before bloggers and the Internet, DJ's were a critical cultural conduit between artists, record companies and fans). He worked mostly in Cincinnati, Dallas, Philly and D.C. A long career croaked, like travel agents and other intermediaries, by the disintermediating nature of the Internet. (A longer discourse on that phenomenon on another day, perhaps.) So, after thirty years of paying into Medicare and private health plans, Steve was unlucky enough to get cancer just as the radio business was dying at the hands of recession and the Internet. After the initial treatment, his insurance ran out and his now pre-existing condition meant no carrier would insure him going forward. So when the original cancer surgery made him susceptible to hernia, he had no insurance to pay for treatment. The dilemma: live with an idling illness, or go broke paying for the surgery to fix it.
So here's a productive upper middle class guy--not the "lazy welfare queen" you are so reluctant to help--who is in an untenable situation. The point being, if it can happen to Steve, it can happen to anyone.