This is a diary about health care reform. I'll do my best to say what I need to say.
I've written before about a family member of mine who had been diagnosed with an aggressive and deadly cancer. I'm sad to report that he has died. It's shocking, and it's sad. But I don't want to focus on that. I want to tell all of you why I am relieved, why I'm able to be happy even in the middle of my family's mourning.
We'll call him my father-in-law. He was my sister's father-in-law, but I still consider him family. So that's what we'll call him.
His name was Jim.
Jim was a New Zealand sheep farmer. A man who only quit working from dawn to dusk when all of his children were settled in and had children of their own. He and his wife left the farm they'd lived on for years and moved closer to their children, to a quiet retirement with grandchildren and cups of tea.
Jim wasn't always nice. He was a New Zealand sheep farmer, for goodness sake. He was a short, tough man, balding, with a twinkle in his eye that would turn to fire if you or one of the dogs screwed up - and, believe me, the dogs were often more valuable because they'd do what they were told when they were told, by God! But that's the kind of pissed off you expect in a farmer, and when we came home and took off our gum boots, Jim was never anything but kind. Oh, he'd tell it to you straight, whatever "it" was, but he was a fine, good man, who loved his family as hard as he worked his land.
If I'm making it sound like he was a hard-ass, he was, but he wasn't mean about it. He was just a guy who lived and worked tirelessly from the time he could pick up shears to the day he retired. I can't even say he always made time for his family, because there was always a river flooding or a mudslide or a fence falling apart at 3am. But his family was always foremost in his mind. Always. And he always made me feel like a part of it.
So this tough, hard-ass farmer gets knocked down by cancer and dies. Where, you might wonder, is the possible silver lining?
It's here: because New Zealand has a socialized health care system, Jim and the rest of our family didn't pay a penny for his care, other than his medications, and even those cost almost nothing compared to their US counterparts. He paid his taxes (I won't say without complaint, but he paid them), and, when he became sick, he had phenomenal care, doctors who were honest with him about end of life planning, and, most important of all, his family.
His children didn't have to take on extra jobs to pay the bills. His wife didn't have to sell the house to pay for another treatment. My brother-in-law was able to purchase an expensive last-minute ticket to New Zealand because he wasn't spending all of the family's money on health care. All of them - other than my brother-in-law, who is subject to our barbaric system - paid their taxes too, and, at the end, they didn't have to worry about anything other than the most important thing in the world: each other.
And you know what? Jim and his wife have a little bit of money put aside that they can pass on to their children "despite" the New Zealand tax rates, in part because their hard earned money was not, at the end when the family was most vulnerable, paid to hospitals. Because they'd made an investment in the most powerful insurance a person can buy: a policy supported by the entire population of the country.
New Zealand has something of a hybrid system, in that (as I understand it) patients pay for routine expenses and medication and can purchase private supplemental insurance. But critical care, the sort of care that bankrupts families, is paid for out of a common pool. And it works. And when it doesn't - no human system is perfect - it's no worse that what we endure here.
And that's why I'm relieved.
Friends, the health care bill that we're working to put in place: it's not an insurance company welfare bill, it's not a handout to the poor, it's not a fucking abortion bill. It's a health care bill. It's meant to leverage the aggregate power of 300 million Americans to make health care something that just happens, like the police responding to a crime or the fire department responding to a fire, except that doctors and hospitals remain private entities. It's a bill to make our lives, all of our lives, even family and friends who aren't sick, even the rich and powerful, better.
I'm preaching to the choir, I know. But remember to tell politicians who are not on board that they are playing with life and death. They are serving as the death panel to end all death panels if they don't get this done.
And when this compromise plan is done, we keep fighting to make it better, more responsive, more just. That's what we do, because we're fighting for Americans. Keep it up. Win this. Help turn us from punch line to exemplar.
We can do it.
Yes. We. Can.