COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Health care’s true face isn’t on TV
When Robert came to the Northwest Buffalo Community Health Care Center, his cholesterol level was 440. Anything above 240 puts you in danger of coronary heart disease.
That’s what happens when you work but still can’t afford health insurance.
“If I was sick, I’d go to the emergency room,” he said, describing life before he started coming to the center.
What would he do without the Lawn Avenue facility.
“Honest to God, I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to file bankruptcy.”
Robert is who we should be talking about. Instead, we are talking about pawns of the far right hijacking the debate with tales of “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” being forced to give up insurance you already have, and President Obama scheming to kill off Grand-ma and Grandpa.
Every claim is false. To borrow Benjamin Disraeli’s line about statistics and apply it to health reform: There are lies, damn lies and GOP talking points.
Yet the strategy is as effective as it is transparent. The scare campaign blocked universal coverage in 1994. Since that “success,” the number of uninsured has climbed to 46 million, while millions more fear being canceled or seeing premiums skyrocket should they ever get sick.
Robert is one of the 46 million.
A 53-year-old driver for a school bus company, he hasn’t had health coverage since he was in a union local when he was 21 or 22. The Town of Tonawanda homeowner, who didn’t want his last name used, started coming to Community Health Care after his mother died of clogged arteries. He now has his cholesterol level down to 165.
The center—with 11 doctors and nurse practitioners and four dentists— is a lifeline for 8,800 people per year. About 26 to 30 percent of them have no insurance, said Executive Director Joanne Haefner. They are treated on a sliding pay scale that makes health care affordable, thanks in part to a $600,000 federal subsidy. It’s another way we all pay for the uninsured and underinsured.
Single policies in the U. S. average $4,700, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. Robert’s employer would have picked up only 15 percent of the tab.
“For me to pay that, I wouldn’t be able to afford my house or anything else,” he said. “I didn’t want to come here in the beginning. I felt, ‘I work. I should pay for it.’ But I just couldn’t afford it.”
His wife had coverage through her job with a nonprofit but recently got laid off. She’ll probably come to the center, too.
“We do a lot of gap coverage for people who do fall out of insurance and find out about us,” Haefner said. There’s a focus on regular, preventive care for folks not used to getting it.
She recounted helping a young mother who wanted to work and be a role model to her daughter, but who would get kicked off of public insurance programs if she progresses on her job and gets a raise.
“What a tough place to be in,” Haefner said of such choices.
Those are the issues the nation should be focused on, not foolish rumors. The success of the distraction machine is a measure of how gullible we are.
Like Obama, Robert doesn’t want to drive up the deficit; he wants a health care bill that’s paid for. But he wants one.
“Canada has it. Europe has it,” he lamented. “We need health care in this country, for all people.”
But you rarely see Robert, or the millions in danger of joining him, on TV news.
“The faces behind it would change people’s minds in a second,” Haefner said.
That’s why opponents would rather show you something else.
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