Having visited my House representative’s website on occasion, being a good little constituent keeping tabs on things (did I mention I was born in Washington DC? It’s in my blood) I got an email a day or two ago: it was a series of questions. The first was, what did I think was the most pressing issue before Congress, offering me several answers to choose from that surprised me on the one item it did not offer.
Or a blank to fill in. Okay, given the timing of that query and what is immediately on Congress’s plate, that was real easy.
The rest were questions about my views on the healthcare bill; surprise, surprise. Beat’em to it at question one.
Though Republicans may shout and continue to believe that Americans want the healthcare industry left alone because all is well, lalalaa fingers in their ears they’re not LISTENingggg…Â It’s simply and absolutely not true.
The current system is killing people of all ages who are treatable and who could have been saved. The very fact that a low-level clerk who was not available after hours, on weekends, or during a snowstorm was making life-and-death decisions IN AN EMERGENCY, with no recourse, about my monoclonal antibody medication a year ago only because my insurer didn’t want to pay for it is unfathomable; just who gave that clerk a medical license? And you know my case is only one of thousands at just that one company, simply because that’s how they’re set up.
This absolutely must change. We may argue over how it is to be done; we may argue over what should fund what; but the current system is absolutely untenable, and after a year of everybody trying to hash out their differences and their beliefs and their constituencies in Washington, after a long and terrible pregnancy, we have birthed a bill. It may be on life support, but we have a bill and it is still breathing.
Like all good politics, it’s full of compromises such that nobody is completely happy with it–it doesn’t go far enough, it goes too far. He looks like your side of the family, he doesn’t look enough like my side of the family.
Yes, well; that’s what democracy produces. Mashups.
Now vote on the %#* thing and PASS it like we voted so many of you into office to do.
(I totally love that Caremark got members of Congress slapping multiple investigations on them for the sake of Federal employees; where were our congressmen when such practices were messing over the rest of us? Where are they now?)