I am very close to losing it, today.
Seriously. After hearing horror story after horror story in last night's MoveOn.com vigil for health care reform (I went to Columbus Circle), I did not sleep last night--I could not.
Dismemberment. Disfigurement. Crippling debt. Missed cancer treatment. Untreated stokes in children. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Fear. Death. And all because people in this country cannot get the care they need to stay alive without somehow beating a system that is financially rigged against us.
Over and over and over again I hear these stories. For months I have heard them. Years, even. And they have left me with one question:
How many horror stories do you need to hear, Mr. President?
How many horror stories do you need to hear, Mr. President, before your heart aches and you have no choice but to pound the pulpit in defense of the American people?
My goodness. I am one person. One person! And in the last 24 hours alone, I have heard enough horror stories about lives ruined by the cruelty of the health insurance nightmare that I cannot sleep anymore.
How many stories does it take to get through to the President?
Mr. President, your people are not just suffering. The American people are dying or worse: they are watching the ones they love the most treated with utter disdain by soulless industry until they are lifeless, dead. They are working themselves to the bone, living moral lives, and then dropping into financial ruin via a system that makes fixed casino gambling look tame by comparison. $10,000 a year for coverage. $20,000 a year for coverage. $100,000 in debt after a few days in the hospital. A lifetime working hard only to see one's entire savings evaporated by health insurance debt. Misery. It is the kind of misery that makes historians weep alone in an archive when they stumble across it--the kind of misery that makes good people doubt whether or not they deserve to live. It is the kind of misery that transforms hard working Americans into used up human garbage.
Does none of this move you, Mr. President? Does none of this keep you awake at night such that you wake up and cannot stop yourself from speaking out passionately in defense of the American people?
It makes me sick to my stomach that I cannot remember one time when I heard the President of the United States--any President--stand up in public, pound the podium, and shout at the top of his lungs that he is absolutely disgusted by what he sees the American people being forced to live through by a a single industry.
The health insurance industry is not some cultural pillar of American life. It's not a critical social institution or a vital source of history or tradition. It's a business idea. Somebody thought up a way to make money, and they gave it a shot.
There is no "health insurance industry" in the Constitution.
There is no "health insurance industry" in the Bible.
There is no "health insurance industry" on 80% of planet earth.
The health insurance industry is a failed concept, plain and simple. It started as a viable business, but it has become a parasite that latched itself onto the American people years ago, gestated slowly, and is draining men, women and children of their dignity, their money, and their lives.
It used to be that Americans paid a reasonable amount per month--$35, $50, $75--to cover in advance for the medical care they needed each year. Now it costs $500, $1000, $1500 per month in advance for medical care that you keep paying for over and over again through a rigged system of denials modeled after a Kafka novel. It's no longer a business. It's a system of extortion. It does not give people piece of mind. It leaves with with horror stories.
How many stories does it take to get through to this President? How many tales of families watching their children die or husbands watching their wives waste away from some treatable disease before the President is no longer sleeping at night? Ten more? A thousand more? Why not one more? Why not no more?
I am not a legislative imbecile. I can understand the logic of not holding out to pass the perfect bill. I can understand the logic of wanting to try to work with an opposition party to pass reform--even if that party invests millions in painting you as a socialist and fascist. I can even understand the manufacture of bureaucratically obfuscating rhetoric to slow down the process, all with an idea of advancing it. I do not agree with any of these things, but I can understand them.
What I cannot understand--what I cannot even remotely fathom--is how any human being can listen to insurance nightmare horror story after horror story from the American people and not be moved to speak out with a voice of stunned outrage. I just don't get it!
The President of the United States has children. He has a wife. He stood by compassionately as his own grandmother died--recently. And yet he still has not shown outrage in response to the collective suffering that millions of Americans have come fourth courageously to describe.
The experiences of millions of Americans, cast in a chorus of voices and filled with enough pain to crack open the earth--and still our President has not shown any emotion.
And so here comes a speech next week that the President plans to give, in which he is scheduled to inform the public where things stand on the health care bill.
Well, let me say this very clearly, Mr. President: The American people have filled the air with so much pain, so much anguish, so many tales of wasted lives at the hands of insurance industry cruelty--if you do not acknowledge that pain in a heartfelt way in this next speech, well...I think there is going to be a serious crisis in this country as a result. If you do not acknowledge it very soon--in a heartfelt and powerful way--than all that collective pain is going to fall hard all across this land and crack the earth beneath you. God help us all if that happens.
I, for one, still believe in this President. I really do. But I don't now how much longer I will be able to sustain that belief if he does not acknowledge the pain that my fellow citizens have so bravely voiced over these past few weeks. These are my friends, my family members, my co-workers, my neighbors, and they are his, too.
The pain of the American people must be acknowledged! It simply must. We cannot go on any longer wondering why the President of the United States seems so unmoved.
Time is running out.