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| March 28, 2007 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth, insurgent49 Your Money Or Your Life
A small coffee shop abuts a medical clinic in B.C.’s rainy, industrial port city of Prince Rupert. As my wife and I order coffee, I look into the clinic. “So is health care really free?” I ask a college-aged, talkative barista. “Yup, sure is,” she says, shaking a can of whipped cream. “You don’t even really need your BC Card in a small town like this.” She explains that the “BC Card” is an all-inclusive government-issued insurance card. You fill out some forms and you can health care when you need it, where you need, and it doesn’t cost you a red penny. “Is there a long wait?” “Naw, you get in right away. Sometimes you have to wait a few weeks for specialists,” she said. Before we left Ketchikan, I sat in the bar with a man who had recently got out of the local hospital. He slumped over in his car and woke up in the emergency room with asthma-related pneumonia. His bill? $110,000. “They charged me $10 per aspirin,” he said, staring into his beer. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I would like to say all Americans consider cost before seeking treatment for a medical problem, but I know there are people for whom coverage is so complete, their salary so atmospheric, and their relationships with physicians so tight (“a round of golf Sunday, doctor?”), that they enjoy the health care of a socialist. With American taxpayers giving an annual average of about $4,700 each for Bush’s war on Iraq, there can no longer be an argument about “who will pay?” Thus far, funds spent on the Iraq imbroglio alone would insure a quarter-billion children (18,000 kids in Alaska alone don’t have health care). “Imagine for a moment,” asks California Nurses Association President Deborah Burger, “how else we could have spent $589 billion, the amount already devoured by the war in Iraq, plus the administration's funding request for the next two years. “With those same dollars, you could buy health insurance for 139 million people, all of the nation’s uninsured for the next three years. Or you could fund the current federal program of spending on HIV/AIDS anti-retroviral drugs for the next 60 years. Or you could cover the cost of educating an additional 39.2 million registered nurses.” I think of these facts when I hear about teachers getting second jobs to pay for health care costs not covered by their “socialist” union plans. The other argument, that healthy people would be asked to support others in society with unhealthy habits (the selfish, angry, and unsympathetic stand) is, of course, equally absurd. Universal health care would enhance early detection and prevention of diseases that, today, account for health care’s high costs. Alaska could easily fund health care coverage for all its residents using earnings from oil royalties. (We would have to be careful to avoid creating plans similar to Arnold’s and Massachusetts’, which don’t control for rising premiums and deductibles.) According to the CNA, under Schwarzenegger’s proposal, a typical L.A. resident would have pay $12,320 up front before any care is covered by the insurance company. What a deal! There is something fundamentally wrong when the richest nation on earth can’t help someone who needs to see a doctor. Worse still, when the richest state has so many children who don’t have access to medical care, there is a profound immorality in our society. Up here in the great land we don’t have to go to far to find an example of a system that works. Drive east and ask the first Canadian you meet ... eh? You can also organize a truth meeting. Check out www.healthcare-now.org for more information. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. 'Red Alert' appears on insurgent49.com every Wednesday. |
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Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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