If you try hard enough you can be anything you want in America. That’s supposed to be an idea expressed to children by parents and teachers. I have an addendum to that expression. You can be anything you want to be in America, just try not to be sick, broke and uninsured. Try being anything you want when you’re broke and debating whether or not to see a doctor or go to the emergency room because there’s no possible way you can afford it.
I don’t mean poor in the sense of some Walker Evan’s Depression-era photo; I mean broke in the sense of the millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and if the ball happens to drop along the way, the lives that they’ve built will crumble faster than a house of cards. The lesson for living a broke lifestyle is simple. Don’t get arrested, don’t get sick and don’t get fired.
Keep in mind that when senators and congressional figures are arguing for and against government health care programs, they are not arguing for the sake of every American. It’s an argument about the poor and broke. If you’ve got money, your argument isn’t whether you’re getting health care, it’s how much of your money is subsidizing the health care for the poor and broke. If you don’t have money, any health care plan will work. The Republican machine is trying to equate the public health care option to getting health care treatment in the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s. People like U.S. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) keep making the statement that a nationalized health care program would put the government between you and your doctor. Many Americans wouldn’t care because there’s already an obstacle between them and a doctor. It’s called money.
They give the scenario that you’d have to wait in line for months to get that knee surgery or a check-up. That’s not necessarily the case, but if you’re broke in the first place that hypothetical wait could have been somewhere between forever and when your knee collapsed.
The awful irony is that many people who struggle financially become their own worst enemies. Broke people tend to eat terribly because eating terrible food is cheap. In one segment of the recently released documentary Food Inc., a family who is struggling to pay for diabetes medication has to consistently make the decision whether to buy healthy from the produce section or buy fast-food, where you can get full for a fraction of the cost. They point out that a fast-food hamburger costs half the price as a head of broccoli. It’s a self-perpetuating lifestyle that effects many facets of our government. Not only do you have people whose medical woes only get resolved through the emergency room, you also have the growing number of poor people on disability.
There has to be a sensible resolution from the top down. There has to be a greater push to convince people to invest in their health by eating better, exercising more and smoking less. And there has to be legislation to get more people insured. Prolonging a visit to the doctor for financial reasons doesn’t help the patient and doesn’t do any good for the American pocketbook either. You can call it socialism, or communism if you’d like. It just sounds like common sense to me.
