Care for the
Uninsurable
Do you know that we now have the equipment and expertise to
keep a person alive indefinitely? Maybe not REALLY alive, but with vital signs
indicative that life still exists.
I wouldn’t want that. My wife and I have living wills, directing
our mate and family to refuse any extraordinary measures to keep us alive after
an illness or injury that incapacitates us, without a hope of recovery. To do
otherwise would not only be a drain on our family’s limited resources, it would
also take years off her life taking care of me, or the other way around. Why?
So that I can lie there and vegetate, incapable of speaking, understanding,
even feeding myself for months into years? No, thank you.
You know where I am headed with this, don’t you?
Jimmy Kimmel made a passionate plea for the continuation of
Obamacare in discussing his own child born with a severe heart defect. My heart
goes out to him and his family. According to Jimmy, however, had the Affordable
Care Act not been enacted, there would have been no help for his child. Very
moving story—full of half-truths and even lies, but very impassioned.
When is the last time you have heard of a baby being thrown
out of a hospital or denied emergency medical treatment because it was born
with a devastating, life-threatening abnormality? Go on; take your time; try to
recall any instance remotely like that. I’ll wait.
Okay, are you finished? How many?
None. Neither the law nor common decency would permit it.
A more pertinent argument might be whether the child born
with a terrible defect gets the very latest, most expensive treatment available and ultra-Herculean efforts to
sustain life for as long as possible.
Damn the cost—that child must live!!
You may believe that every child deserves that kind of treatment—no
child is any more valuable than the next, right? Rich or poor, black or white,
brilliant or intellectually challenged. Let’s consider that for a moment.
The plain fact is, we cannot afford to give that kind of
treatment, free of charge, to all comers—from the United States or any other
nation, because surely you would agree that Japanese or Egyptian or Brazilian
or Australian or French or English children are just as valuable as our own
American babies. Don’t you? Oh, I can just hear some few of you saying, “Wait,
now. We have to draw a line somewhere!”
Ah, there’s the rub. Nobody except Nancy Pelosi believes
that the American taxpayer should or could foot the bill for the latest,
greatest and most expensive health care for everybody on earth. So we must have
some method of limiting access to the very best of care—which, by the way, can
be found . . . Where? . . . I forget. Is it France? No. Is it Canada? No. Is it
England? No. Russia? Greece? Japan? Italy? Germany? No, no, no, no and no. The
best health care in the world is found in the United States of America,
precisely because we have thus far not allowed the government total management
of that vital one-sixth of our economy.
No country, regardless how wealthy, can provide free
health care to an unlimited number of people whose illness or malady, while
desperate and needful of care, could
cost the taxpayers upward of $1,000,000 a year or more—per patient! That is a
sad reality. Hospitals and E R’s are required to administer what aid is
necessary to keep a patient alive; to do everything humanly possible to treat
them—up to a point. But if the cost of that care exceeds the patient or
patient’s family’s ability to pay and they do not have the insurance or
personal wealth to cover such costly care, what is to be done? Reasonable
people might then say those extraordinary efforts must be curtailed. Not just
for John Doe or his child or grandchild, but for the progeny of Bill Clinton,
Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer, Ted Turner or anyone else of wealth and power. I
must say if those people have the wherewithal to purchase such treatment out of their own wealth, we have no right
to deny them the privilege of spending their money in that way. Do we?
If anyone in your life has ever told you that life is fair,
they either didn’t know what they were talking about, or they flat-out lied to
you. Even our courts informed us in the 1970s that all Americans are equal, but
. . . In certain circumstances, some are more equal than others. Remember
Affirmative Action? More recently, these same courts have decreed that
motivation can be a huge factor in the sentence one gets for commission of a
crime. I’m not sure how you can fine-tune emotion to reach that determination,
but if you are deemed to have been motivated by “hate” to murder someone, your
sentence may be vastly more severe than if you, say, killed a guy that you
liked. Does that make sense to you? The victim is dead in either instance, and
I doubt that he is going to rejoice in his grave because a jury adjudged the
crime to have been motivated by hatred. It won’t bring him back to life! And
you can only put the perpetrator to death once. He can’t even twice serve his
entire life in prison. Once is all you get.
But I digress. There are some serious problems we will be
required to face in the not-too-distant future—as soon as we figure out how
harmful political correctness has
been to our nation and quit allowing secular humanists to set our entire
agenda. In order to address these
issues, we must first acknowledge that we have a problem. THIS—the insurance
for those with un-insurable diseases/maladies—is just one of them. Insurance for
them, as you might imagine, is very expensive. Not many of us can afford it. We
can, by working with a pool of like “un-insurable patients”, obtain
catastrophic insurance—still expensive, but shared by a larger pool of those
with the same or similar problems, costing much less than trying to buy an
individual policy.
Bottom line is, we have finite resources to handle what
could rapidly become an overwhelming need—or want; there is a difference. Let
me say again—while it is unpleasant either to say or to hear, the plain fact is
we cannot afford to pay for the health care of all those who 1) simply don’t
want to purchase it for themselves, 2) are in this country illegally and have
thus far not even been asked to pay for their insurance OR treatment, in some
states, and 3) also provide the most expensive services in the world to a
multitude of un-insurable patients.
Does political correctness allow us to consider the cause of
a patient’s super-expensive malady? Can we offer less coverage to the man who
smokes two or three packages of cigarettes while his lungs are eaten up with
cancer? How about the alcoholic who continues drinking although he has
cirrhosis of the liver? Or the promiscuous homosexual who through dangerous
dating habits contracts aids? These are self-inflicted, in a sense. Are the
taxpayers on the hook for all expenses related to their maladies? You see, it
is easy to be compassionate regarding a baby born with a defect not of its own
doing. Can we recognize the difference and make allowances therefore? You see, while secular humanists have tried hard to erase it, the fact remains, the are consequences to our actions.
We can do what many other nations have done: We can provide
what may be good but is also necessarily rationed health care to our
citizens. That route will inevitably lead to less research and development, a
disincentive to try new methods, a loss of patient-doctor relations and a much
poorer product. Sure, it might be “free”. But the participant gives up much
freedom to obtain what is neither truly free nor effective.
I do not regard the
advice of Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the founders of Obamacare, who sees no reason
to live past seventy or so; you ostensibly have little or nothing to offer
society, so you might as well die.
President Obama told a woman in July of 2009
that perhaps her mother, with a serious heart condition, ‘may be better off,
uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the pain pill’.
No, I do not intend to go quietly to my grave, although when
my time does come, would that I could mimic the actions of an old ranch hand I
read about years ago.
This fellow had worked as a cowboy for the same man since
his teens. He and his boss grew old together. The old cowboy was married, and
as he saddled up his horse and left the house on a typical morning shortly
after his 80th birthday, he said his usual goodbye to his wife and
headed off, supposedly to ride the fence line. When he did not come home that
day and stayed out all night, his wife contacted the ranch owner to let him
know her husband was missing.
They found the old cowboy on the south forty, lying on his
back with his hat over his chest, hands folded beneath it. They first thought
he had fallen off his horse, but that was quickly discounted. This man was
practically born on a horse. He left no note, but his wife and employer knew
what had happened. He had simply concluded his time had come, and he just lay
down in the pastures he loved and allowed his soul to leave his body. He didn’t
need end-of-life counseling. He knew intuitively that death is a perfectly
natural end to the life cycle.
I would hope to have the courage and the faith in God to
face my death with that kind of magnanimity.
We can only forestall death for a season. It will come to all of
us—unless Christ’s return precedes it. Until that time comes, I’m going to try
to live life in the most politically incorrect way possible.
