Points No. 1, 2 & 3

Why is it that someone who is most assuredly not a night person is so often struck by inspiration in the final dark hours of the day? Well that is a question to ponder some other day I suppose, but for now, more on healthcare.

I know, I know. I am sick of the topic too, but sometimes you have to worry over something until you are thoroughly sick of it before you see the light and can make things right. I have three points to make in that vein, so bare with me.

Point No. 1
The spouse asked me the other day if I knew what the public option was. I do not. Nor could I properly explain how that might differ from a single payer system. Admittedly, I am sure that I could dig around, do my research and come up with an answer. Hell, I could just try to muster up some common sense and make a best case scenario guess, but off the top of my head? Nope, stuck. And that seems, to me, to be a BIG problem. The spouse and I watch/read a fair bit of the news, probably I would estimate more than your average American. If we can't give a reasonable response to that question, then I would venture to say that neither could that average American. Which means (not that we didn't already suspect this) the people hollering at these town hall meetings have no clue what they are yelling about.

Point No. 2
I have a dear friend of going on 18 years who is in the process of saying goodbye to a beloved friend of hers. This woman is dying of breast cancer and most likely has but weeks to live, if that. She is not even 35. I have met her, dined at her house, and although we are in no sense of the word close, I can't shake the feeling of just how wrong this is. She is younger than me, she never had the chance to have children. She leaves a husband who never imagined he would have to say goodbye to his wife so early and so young. It does something to shake my inner bouncy ball core, which seems so resilient despite my better efforts to kill it. I don't know what the financial condition of this young woman and her husband is. I don't know what their insurance situation is either, but I do not doubt that even if they have "good" insurance there has been a significant accumulation of expense during her sickness. So not only his her husband left alone, bereft, he is left with God knows what kind of debt to handle as he is grieving. That simply seems too much for one soul to take on.

Point No. 3
To finalize, and somewhat combine the previous two points, I was just reading Jonathan Alter's Newsweek essay "Health Care as a Civil Right." In it, Alter not only makes the point that Obama & Team need to reframe the argument for healthcare reform to center it around the belief that healthcare is a RIGHT and not some ridiculous luxury afforded only to those who are not sick and who have money, but that this public option hullabaloo has overshadowed this idea and is, in fact, not central to the issue. Did you know that half of U.S. bankruptcies are a result of medical expenses? Isn't that shameful? And when Alter says, "Passage [of healthcare reform] would end the shameful era in our nation's history when we discriminated against people for no other reason that that they were sick."

Even if you are sick of the subject that is something to think about, don't you think?