The fight for affordable healthcare: 40+ years and still counting
The quest for affordable and available healthcare for all Americans has been underway for a long time and I’ve been involved in it for more than 40 years.
Please try to put all the information, misinformation and disinformation (I could have used a shorter word) about the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, out of your mind and follow me through those 40 years to get some perspective on what’s happening now.
My part began on the front porch of an emaciated old woman’s front porch in Arthurdale, West Virginia, in 1971. I was a young editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper on the other side of the county.
Arthurdale was the first of many New Deal planned communities established in 1933 during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The idea for a self-sufficient community originated when Eleanor Roosevelt learned of a plan to relocate a group of West Virginia coal miners to a farm with the intention of combining subsistence farming with small industries to reclaim their economic footing.
The lady on the front porch had been 14 years old when she married one of those miners. He was quite a bit older, but they had a good life until he died. Now she was alone, uneducated, unskilled, unable to work because of multiple healthcare issues and without healthcare insurance.
Sitting with her was Senator Ted Kennedy, the longtime champion for healthcare-for-all. He understood that this woman hardly had enough money to pay her rent and not enough to put food on her table. She would die soon for the lack of adequate healthcare, even though she could receive bare minimum care as an uninsured patient.
Less than 10 years later I found myself a member of the West Virginia State Senate and chairman of the Healthcare Committee. It would have been my opportunity to do something about healthcare for the uninsured, but it was the era for transferring the blame to healthcare providers and shirking the social responsibility of government to level the field.
While demonizing the healthcare providers, the stampede was on to pass laws and create healthcare cost containment agencies that would whip the bad guys into submission. They loved to talk about the $10 aspirin while shifting the cost of welfare programs by passing them, but not funding them, shifting the cost of charity and, thereby increasing the cost of aspirin. Theoretically, states have to pass a balanced budget, but nothing prevents them from not paying their bills.
It was then that I began to talk about “sick taxes,” cost-shifting of the government’s responsibility to paying patients and then bragging about a balanced budget with no new taxes. I became disgusted with government and resigned my second term a year early. Went to work for the West Virginia Hospital Association (not as a lobbyist) and a few months later became president and CEO of the Nevada Hospital Association where the nation’s largest hospital r in Las Vegas was the whipping boy of the country.
Ironically, it was the American Hospital Association (AHA) that was the strongest supporter of Hilary Clinton’s brave effort to pass true healthcare reform. I served on committees of the AHA, which worked hard to support her effort. But you know the rest of that story.
And so, here we are. It’s 2013 and still nothing significant has been done to solve the problem. I give President Barack Obama high marks for his courage to stand up to the opponents of fair access to healthcare for all Americans in his very first term, when he was immediately a candidate for re-election.
I don’t need to read the details of the Affordable Care Act to know that it is right-minded for the American people. I trust it, warts and all. What I don’t trust is the political right, which is more interested in pleasing the ones who really run this country, capitalists who don’t have social responsibility written into their self-serving “winner-take-all” constitution.
Please try to put all the information, misinformation and disinformation (I could have used a shorter word) about the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, out of your mind and follow me through those 40 years to get some perspective on what’s happening now.
My part began on the front porch of an emaciated old woman’s front porch in Arthurdale, West Virginia, in 1971. I was a young editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper on the other side of the county.
Arthurdale was the first of many New Deal planned communities established in 1933 during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The idea for a self-sufficient community originated when Eleanor Roosevelt learned of a plan to relocate a group of West Virginia coal miners to a farm with the intention of combining subsistence farming with small industries to reclaim their economic footing.
The lady on the front porch had been 14 years old when she married one of those miners. He was quite a bit older, but they had a good life until he died. Now she was alone, uneducated, unskilled, unable to work because of multiple healthcare issues and without healthcare insurance.
Sitting with her was Senator Ted Kennedy, the longtime champion for healthcare-for-all. He understood that this woman hardly had enough money to pay her rent and not enough to put food on her table. She would die soon for the lack of adequate healthcare, even though she could receive bare minimum care as an uninsured patient.
Less than 10 years later I found myself a member of the West Virginia State Senate and chairman of the Healthcare Committee. It would have been my opportunity to do something about healthcare for the uninsured, but it was the era for transferring the blame to healthcare providers and shirking the social responsibility of government to level the field.
While demonizing the healthcare providers, the stampede was on to pass laws and create healthcare cost containment agencies that would whip the bad guys into submission. They loved to talk about the $10 aspirin while shifting the cost of welfare programs by passing them, but not funding them, shifting the cost of charity and, thereby increasing the cost of aspirin. Theoretically, states have to pass a balanced budget, but nothing prevents them from not paying their bills.
It was then that I began to talk about “sick taxes,” cost-shifting of the government’s responsibility to paying patients and then bragging about a balanced budget with no new taxes. I became disgusted with government and resigned my second term a year early. Went to work for the West Virginia Hospital Association (not as a lobbyist) and a few months later became president and CEO of the Nevada Hospital Association where the nation’s largest hospital r in Las Vegas was the whipping boy of the country.
Ironically, it was the American Hospital Association (AHA) that was the strongest supporter of Hilary Clinton’s brave effort to pass true healthcare reform. I served on committees of the AHA, which worked hard to support her effort. But you know the rest of that story.
And so, here we are. It’s 2013 and still nothing significant has been done to solve the problem. I give President Barack Obama high marks for his courage to stand up to the opponents of fair access to healthcare for all Americans in his very first term, when he was immediately a candidate for re-election.
I don’t need to read the details of the Affordable Care Act to know that it is right-minded for the American people. I trust it, warts and all. What I don’t trust is the political right, which is more interested in pleasing the ones who really run this country, capitalists who don’t have social responsibility written into their self-serving “winner-take-all” constitution.
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