Health care a dime at a time
Reported contributing writer Tony Wheeler:
The event held at the Coon Hunters Club … [and] featured hot dog supper plates, a cake auction and a live auction with gift certificates from restaurants, salons, the fitness center, local automotive shops and a weekend home makeover package and local gospel groups singing.
Wheeler didn’t quantify the success, but it was clear that the event got some press ahead of time, that the family was known in the community, and that all factors combined for a huge turnout.
Wheeler and the News did make clear the challenge that the uninsured Reeves family faces:
The cost of the surgeries is estimated to be up around $108,000 and the Reeves’ are having trouble getting North Carolina Medicaid to approve Layla going out-of-state for the procedures, which are more complicated and therefore requiring more expertise than most. Therein lies a troubling dilemma for the family – accepting care from doctors in the state who are admittedly less experienced in Layla’s rare condition so that Medicaid will take care of the bill, or get the best possible care in Cincinnati and fret over the financial part …
Wheeler quoted the child’s grandmother:
The money the benefit raised will not only take care of the expenses of being away [and away from work for weeks], it will actually keep them from missing a mortgage payment and ensure they have a home to come back to.
What the money doesn’t begin to touch, of course, is the cost of the surgery itself.
This relative success story is one of very few in our area, where nearly every trip to the grocery store or gas station includes the sight of a jar on the counter collecting pennies to pay for heart by-passes or cancer treatments.
And when those treatments are for an infant, it’s enough to take your breath away. There’s no escaping the reality of it: “Spare a dime sir? My child is dying.”
There isn’t a shortage of information about health care reform, of course, but there isn’t any doubt that it is one of the foremost challenges our nation faces.
Paul Krugman, an economist and New York Times columnist, and a strong supporter of universal health care, has written extensively on the subject. He touched on it again Friday, with a brief overview of where the current candidates stand on the subject:
The health care situation, in case you haven’t noticed, is going from bad to worse. Many smaller [employers] stopped offering benefits between 2000 and 2005. In the past, health coverage has tended to improve when the economy recovers from recession — but the “Bush boom” brought at best a temporary stabilization.
And now that the economy is weakening again, another plunge is in progress: last week UnitedHealth warned investors that its business is suffering because fewer employers are offering coverage to their workers.
The Democrats have been offering real plans in response; they’re not perfect, but they are serious.
The G.O.P., by contrast — and this goes as much for Mr. McCain as for the Bush administration — hasn’t even tried to address concerns about coverage. Instead, it has all been about costs, which Republicans insist (wrongly) can be dramatically reduced by a policy of, you guessed it, deregulation and tax cuts.
Until a few days ago, the only answer the McCain campaign offered to those worried about lack of coverage was the vague, implausible assertion that the magic of the marketplace would make health care cheap enough for everyone to afford.
Now Mr. McCain has admitted that maybe a government program is needed for those who can’t get private insurance. This appears to be a response to criticism from Elizabeth Edwards, who has been pointing out that deregulated insurers would deny coverage to anyone with, say, a history of cancer — a category that includes both her and Mr. McCain himself. But the way Mrs. Edwards has rattled the McCain campaign is evidence of just how vulnerable he is on the issue.
The point is that the health care issue could be Exhibit A for a Democratic campaign based on the argument that they are the party of pragmatic solutions, while modern Republicans won’t even acknowledge problems that don’t fit into their rigid ideological framework.
Tags: Macon County
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