Is This Really Happening?

Some of you know I got some darker medical news this week--news that will involve my participation in a new procedure that involves removing portions of my blood, sending them to Atlanta for transformation (making them, we hope, into better cancer fighters), returning them here to be returned to my body. (This will happen three times over five weeks.)

Okay. Are you guessing this will be expensive? (Duh!)

My insurance company has not yet approved the expense, but I do know this: If the approval does not come, there is no way we can afford it.

And so we come to the relentless GOP determination to attenuate or--even better, in their view--destroy the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).  Now, I will acknowledge--and quickly, too--that the AFC has some problems--problems that could be fixed if you-know-who would agree to it.

But, no. Obama did it. So, ipso facto, it must go!

The latest tactic is to eliminate the individual mandate--the requirement that you have health insurance. This kind of mandate seems not to bother us at all (and even qualifies as a "no-brainer") when we apply it to auto and home insurance, right?

Ask yourself: How much would car insurance--would home insurance--cost you if other owners of cars and homes were not legally required to buy it--if they (or you) could, well, opt out?

The cost would rocket out beyond our Milky Way.

The case is even more compelling with health insurance. There are people who will never make a claim on their auto insurance, their home insurance. They just pay premiums, year after year after year.

But the chances of your one day needing medical insurance? One hundred percent. (Unless a UFO whisks you away for some ... experimentation.)

I don't even want to mention the patent cruelty of arguing that some people "deserve" health care and others do not. (I just did--mention it, that is; it's a rhetorical device called apophasis*.) (Sneaky, eh?) Such "only-the-deserving" thinking is, I think, in violation of every religious and moral code I learned in childhood--and beyond. As Hamlet said about the skull: "My gorge rises at it."

I would happily pay higher taxes to help people who need it. (Talk about a "no-brainer"!).

We need to act as if we truly believe those things we profess to believe--that do unto others stuff, you know?

We need to treat all people with the same kindness and empathy we would if we knew that they were dying.

But, wait ... we all are dying ... right?



* apophasis (from Merriam-Webster): the raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it (as in “we won’t discuss his past crimes”)