When Enough is truly Enough

My good friend Kevin wrote to me last night because he was so angry that Dennis had been blocked from participating in the last Democratic Debate in Iowa today. Do you know why the valid presidential candidate was disqualified? The purported reason had to do with where the campaign's headquarters were located.
Perhaps another reason is at the heart of the matter. And it so happens that Kevin's anger and the reason that Dennis was denied the opportunity to speak about his ideas specfically related to health care has to do with who was one of the sponsors of this "debate."
Kevin is a good friend and his health concerns are large because not only is he on disability but his wife has MS. Her illness is a huge drain on their finances. He wrote to me earlier this month about Dennis and what he had to say about health care, that he was in favor of a single-payer, unviversal health care system that was and will never be a for profit delivery system. This bill hich he co-sponsored with John Conyers of Detroit is a vast overhauling of how we would receive our medical benefits. Kevin was quite sceptical as to whether or not this could even be passed in the congress with the kinds of money the insurance industry has and the way they would fight this.
Others too have written about this. You see, they don't ask how Dennis would fund this because that is really a no brainer, they ask how will he get the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry with their enormous lobbies to not butcher his ideas and keep them from becoming a reality?
I understand only too well too what it is like to spend and spend on insurance and to never really get what it is you need. The insurers fight you every step of the way. It is a frightening system that causes such awful problems for so many people that it could fill long ledgers of names of people who would benefit if only we could get this type of universal coverage administered the way Medicare is administered now.
But, then there is the huge stumbling block--the insurance industry. Who is one of the largest backers of the organization sponsoring the debate today? The insurance companies, in fact all of them. If you live long enough to join this organization, from the moment you give them the check, your mailbox is flooded with all kinds of insurance forms to sell you anything that can be insured. This organization's whole purpose in life is to be a shill for the insurance companies. In fact, if we all stretch our minds back a year or so ago, it was AARP that had a membership revolt when they found out how that organization that purported to represent their interests was really representing the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when the whole argument about Medicare drug coverage was proposed by the Bush administration.
So, the fact that Dennis Kucinich is in favor of and proposed, in essence, to end our servitude to the insurance companies, is it any wonder that they are in favor of thwarting his efforts to get his message out?
I watch with interest who the companies are that sponsor these debates and for the most part, not one of the companies spending their money to host these events are representative of the interests of the majority of us who work hard, try to save a little bit and are stretched financially in more ways than we care to report to anyone.
I have listened to Dennis answer questions about this plan while following him around in New Hampshire. I can tell you one important lesson I learned from his description of his health care reform ideas is that we don't sit in judgement of what people need. When a person is in need we help because that is what we are here for.
It can be applied to every social service we need to extend to the citizenry of this country and only one person is talking that way and making it clear where he stands and who he represents. That is why Dennis Kucinich is not allowed to speak--because he really does represent us and what we need.
A more humane way of dealing with all of our ills could be possible if we all get out there and elect Dennis Kucinich for president whether his name is on the ballot or not. It is like making a real investment in all our futures.

Health Care Report from New Hampshire, Part 2

I am sure that most of you saw the hostage situation unfold in New Hampshire on Friday. I did a bit of reading around of the papers and the blogs to see how people responded to the situation. It is unfortunate that the sympathy by and large all goes to the people who were taken hostage and none of it goes out to this poor guy who had no other way to bring attention to the fact that he was in desperate need of real mental health workers who could work with him to end whatever was obviously disturbing him to such a severe degree.

This man, Leeland Eisenberg, didn't take a gun into the Clinton campaign headquarters and he didn't fire at anyone nor did he hurt someone. What he did was make a really bad call for help. What he got was a lot of attention for a problem that is truly huge in these states where the funding has been severely cut or is nonexistent for good mental health services as well as substance abuse programs. I don't have the figures right here but will find them as to what New Hampshire spends on such cases, but it was known to people in Rochester, NH that this man needed help. Why he didn't receive it is a mystery.

The kind of Sherlock Holmes we need right now is the one who actually sees there is no mystery involve. We all need to be covered for our mental health problems just as we need to be covered for our problems with drug abuse and anger management and our depression and our more severe forms of mental illness. Without this type of coverage in place along with the facilities and professionals who are trained to work with this part of the population, we won't have a decent and democratic form of health care. We will continue to maintain a very discriminatory form that is based solely on your ability to pay.

We cannot send our mentally ill to Bangkok for weekly therapy sessions. While many travel there for surgery, the kind of intense and personally involving care a person with a mental illness deserves and requires is quite different. It also means that we as a society must learn to value all humans no matter their ability to perform as we do.

Dennis' comments to the man in New Hampshire about there being those who do not truly deserve health insurance and the benefits in his plan were fair and would have helped Leeland Eisenberg. He would not have had to take a political ad by Clinton and turn it into a personal message to him that he could get her help if he could get her attention.

Health Care Report from New Hampshire

It has become clear to many in this country how poorly our current health care truly cares for us. While I was in New Hampshire last week, I heard Dennis speak about his plan for a single-payer, not for profit system and how it would work. But first a little scene setting.

We were at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school hosted a Town Hall meeting where a few students had been chosen to ask Dennis questions, which he answered and then he answered questions from the audience. (A report on the following exchange I am about to mention is at the Exeter Times website.) An older gentleman stood up and asked about what Dennis could do for him. It turns out he was a prostate cancer survivor but now his wife was stricken with some form of lymphoma and required an injection every two weeks that cost $10,000 a shot. That is an incredible sum of money and he wanted Dennis to look into this fro him and to see just how the company making this drug could get away with these kinds of charges.

After Dennis promised he would investigate this, another gentleman spoke about what Dennis would do to make sure in his proposed system of health care that there would not be abuses by those who were either malingerers or those who just never took care of themselves.

Dennis, in his own fashion, answered the question. One of the things I came to see was how he would place in context his own reasoning. Answers to questions are not just straightforward rote recitations of facts and figures. There was this constant use of both his own personal experience and how that influenced his ideas. In this case, he spoke of watching his mother die from emphysema. He then moved on to say that of course we would always encourage people to live healthy lives but we would never penalize someone who didn't. According to the world as Dennis sees it, we all could be this woman who ended up with a disease out of the blue that requires this kind of extraordinary treatment. Plus, we are all here for each other. There are those who take excellent care of themselves and something horrible happens. There are those who don't take care of themselves. But the system is there for all of us. This is what a democracy is to Dennis and it made a lot of sense to a lot of people in the room that night.

Then today in the Boston Globe I read the op-ed piece by this doctor who had been assured that his daughter would receive two years of post graduate health insurance on her parents' policy and things didn't work out that way. He said in his piece:
Two important lessons can be learned. First, we need to sever the connection between healthcare and employment. People need continuous, portable coverage that is affordable, comprehensive, and equitable. Second, we cannot depend on the private insurance industry to provide this for us.
Piece-meal reform such as the new law will not work. Both employers and the public support the concept of single-payer healthcare. Big business is starting to realize that a single payer system will be the only affordable way to cover everyone. When will our politicians understand that their political futures will depend on supporting this kind of comprehensive reform?
Michael Kaplan is a family physician and a member of Physicians for a National Health Plan and the board of directors of the Universal Health Care Education Fund.