Making The Pie Higher

Here's your Eat-Shit-and-Die pie, Mr. Mittster -- I made it special just for you.

[hackneyed Fred Thompson/Dukes of Hazzard voiceover]

Now, when ol' Willard tried to mosey hisself along New Hampshuh's finest dinin' 'stablishments, an' mingle with the common folks like he knew what was ailin' 'em, well, he got hisself a li'l ol' soo-prize when one o' the commoners came up on him an' a-ankle-bit 'im. Oh my, did the front porch a-squeak an' a-rock with laughter. Hell, ol' Cooter durn near choked on the dip o' Skoal he had a-brewin' in his lip.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Mitt Romney was about a minute into an answer about his commitment to fighting the global spread of AIDS and health care diplomacy on Wednesday when a waitress behind the counter yelled out a question.

"What about our nation? How 'bout the USA? C'mon!" yelled Michele Griffin, a 12-year veteran behind the counter at one of Manchester's most famous eating establishments.

She turned to walk away, but the former Masschusetts governor and Republican presidential candidate called her back, sparking an emotional and confrontational 10-minute exchange about health care and the needs of the working class. The already hot diner got even hotter fast.

....

"After we pay our huge deductibles for our insurance and our cost for our prescriptions, there's nothing left," she said.

"Are you a Massachusetts resident?" Romney asked.

"No I'm a New Hampshire resident," Griffin said, and then added, before Romney could jump in, that "we pay over $1,000 a month for our insurance. Then we have co pays. Every time you go to the doctor, it's $50 a visit. Then you have co-pays for our prescriptions. Can you tell me what your co pay is?"

"Yes," Romney said. "$10 for each prescription."

"That's very nice isn't it?" Griffin answered dryly.

"Yes. What are yours? Romney asked.

"Mine are like $30-$50. I have three sick children."

I love it when these little publicity stunts go awry. Is it unfair to slap Romney with the Marie Antoinette label? I don't think so. That's not a slam at Romney in particular; he's as indifferent and ignorant as any other swell who literally has no clue about how working-class people eke their way through life, preyed upon by the jungle beasts of the health-care industry.

I have heard several modest proposals toward patching up a fatally-flawed health-care system that is going to collapse under the weight of rapidly aging and dying baby boomers, but I have yet to hear anything approaching a solution. Single-payer proposals are nice, but they will fix very little, because like the rest of the "solutions" they don't address the problem.

The problem is that HMOs, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies are, for all intents and purposes, in cahoots to grift as much money out of people as possible. As a result, health care is practically free for the very poor and the very rich. Everybody else gets royally screwed on exorbitant medications, high deductibles, high co-pays, all toward paying outrageous rates on everything.

As you can see in the comments in the article, many people have their own bright solutions. Heh, well, hey lady, maybe you shoulda married up and not had sick kids, heh. Real fuckin' samaritan there, Chief. Good luck with your colon cancer in about ten or twenty years. Maybe your insurance will cover you, or maybe you can mortgage your house to cover the deductible and the co-pay for chemo and meds. Or maybe you can put down your copy of Atlas Shrugged for two minutes and rejoin the human race.

I think it's damned peculiar that so many people rush to defend the vampire, while simultaneously blaming his hapless victims for showing their necks. I think it says a lot about people that they think it's fine that other people should simply work till they fucking drop, just to get by, just to cover usurious expenses contrived by marketers and pencil pushers who make six figures a year convincing people that their nighttime jimmy-legs are some sort of condition that requires medication to "cure".

Last year, my wife had a run of breathing problems, which seemed to revolve around either asthma (which she had never had before), or allergies, or a combination of the two. Since we live in an agricultural area, in a valley beset by winds and dust, the cause was almost certainly environmental. Neither of us have ever smoked, and she doesn't drink, so there were no bad habits to quit. Neither of us have any pre-existing conditions, and we're both about forty years old. It could simply have been a change in type and/or degree of pollen in the air, from crop rotation, smoke from excessive agricultural burning, whatever.

So she took my sucky insurance and went to a few doctors trying to get to the bottom of this. There was definitely no desire to get this or that medication, unless absolutely necessary, but a doctor prescribed a medicated inhaler, and gave her a sample. It worked in the sense that normal breathing resumed, but the steroids in the medication gave her blinding headaches and nausea. Still, she could breathe. Success!

Alas, a 30-day inhaler ran about $120/month, and was not covered by my sucky insurance. The cause was never formally diagnosed, and fortunately the symptoms have subsided to at least a livable extent. But not before she had gone to specialists, pharmacies, the whole nine yards, racking up about $1200 that we don't have in expenses. And the subsiding could simply be due to seasonal change, so we might be right back to square one in a few months. (And yes, we are trying to consolidate our finances and move, but until I finish school and get my student loan repayment figured out, it's impossible to relocate.)

So, to recap -- even though we had insurance, we got dicked around for about five months on this shit, to no small expense of time, money, and sanity. And we just consider ourselves lucky that it was nothing terribly "serious", to the extent that you can regard being able to breathe lightly. Freedom of choice ain't all it's cracked up to be when you're basically forced to pick which predator you want to devour you in the least painful fashion.

This story should be bigger than a mere gotcha on Mitt Romney who, while an enabler and a symptom of the disease that pervades Americans' perceptions of the crumbling health-care system, is not the cause. It's another part of our infrastructure, like our desiccating water sources for our desert oases, like our withering electrical grid, like that collapsed overpass in Minnesota, that everyone seems to think they're entitled to, but no one wants to pay for.

Well, we can continue to let ourselves be grifted by the soulless scamboogery of billion-dollar corporations, whether under the imprimatur of "single-payer" or whatever, or we can diagnose the root of the problem. It's not runaway malpractice costs, and it's not even obese Americans, though preventive health and wellness could certainly be factored into a restructured health system and make it much more cost-effective.

It's about following the money, and understanding which small slice of the American pie is truly benefiting from the system as it stands. And even more fundamentally, if every legislator and politician had to live under the same health-care system that people like Michele Griffin do, they'd find a way to fix it tomorrow. Never forget that. This problem can absolutely be solved, but as long they are being rented by Big Pharma and Big Insurance, it won't be, it'll just get a happy new coat of paint slapped on it, trotted around for a quick view, and nothing will change.