The GreaterTragedy

On a national news cable channel a portion of a video was played this week.  Made through the resources of an organization called Ready to Believe, it was of a sister of one of the shooting victims at the Century Multiplex in Aurora, Colorado.  She is an attractive young woman named Chloe Anderson and makes a poignant plea, with soft music in the background, for the viewer to contribute to an internet fund and to also pass the link for the video onto other potential viewers.  She shares in the video that the financial burden her family faces for the medical treatment of her wounded sister Petra is “daunting”, and they have the possible prospect of having to choose between treatment for Petra and her mother’s need for cancer treatment. As of the time I viewed the video six days after the attack they had raised $202,000. 

She will likely raise the money she needs. Hopefully her family’s burdens will be limited to the health issues they face and not insolvency.  If what the family raises exceeds their needs I suspect they will turn around and donate the difference, being undoubtedly selfless. The entire exercise is a highly visible version of requests for help one sees or hears about with some frequency.  Whether it’s televised pleas, news about bake sales, raffles, marathon marches, firehouse solicitations, church bazaars, or whatever, they all strike a sympathetic chord; moreover they put emphasis on the positive aspects of giving - the greater community helping, perhaps even saving one of its own without a quid pro quo.  It’s even routinely suggested that such action exemplifies the American spirit – independent and unconditional in its rugged resolve to rally around adversity.  To me the event itself has become the real tragedy and I seem to vacillate easily between feelings of nausea and anger.

The good citizens of this nation no longer lead their lives on wagon trains crossing the wilderness.  When times are tough we no longer can expect Sheriff Andy Taylor and Aunt Bea to arrive at the door with a basket of goodness, nor Marcus Welby, MD to cure what ails us in exchange for a wide grin of appreciation.  The greater tragedy is that for every such emotionally uplifting fund drive there are probably hundreds, possibly thousands of people who are forced to give up everything they own just utilize what John Boehner and Eric Cantor call the best health care system on the planet.  The entire sick Republican establishment continues to attack the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) and successfully get a majority of healthy, white, middleclass Americans to believe that begging to get help for health care is the American way.  For Republicans it is the American way, especially for those businesses on the receiving end of all those donations and estate liquidations.  The fact that Mitt Romney is campaigning on, among other things, the vowed repeal of AHCA is a testimony to power of greed and collective idiocy.

In 2014, provided Romney is not elected, everyone will have access to health care insurance, there will be no refusal of anyone for prior conditions, there will be no caps on coverage, and there will be caps on out-of-pocket expenses.  There is no clear evidence that overall health care costs will decline.  That is clearly step two.  The AHCA, when it takes effect in 2014 will reduce government health care costs by only a pittance, a mere $109 billion over 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office, but it’s at least going in the right direction.  But whether we pay for health care as a nation in taxes (my preference) or insurance premiums we finally , as a nation, are in it together…all of us.  The reduction in costs will have to come from the providers, and it will be a battle.  Under the new law the insurance companies are now limited to 20% of premiums for administrative costs and profit.  That’s an improvement.  In all other advanced economies that percentage is in single digits.  We have a ways to go.

When will the American Conservative stop getting their warm and fuzzes by participating (vicariously or actually) in the charitable support of health care for pretty white people? They don’t realize or are too stupid to understand that the system they so lovingly embrace and the changes they so vehemently oppose are simply a manipulation by a really bad political party, whose true interests are very narrow.  Rank and file Conservatives or Tea Partiers should look in the mirror because, like most Americans, they’re not particularly attractive nor particularly gregarious and therefore unlikely to get many hits on their own internet plea for help. This is what they want to keep?