CSotD: Where’s Jacob Riis when we need him?
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Harry Bliss touches a nerve on the eve of my annual physical.
Kind of funny: When I called to make the appointment, the woman at the doctor's office pulled up my records and was trying to schedule me for next month. I said that I had a prescription that needed to be renewed now, however, and that the doctor would probably want to see me before doing that.
"You're not due until November," she said, "so you'd have to pay for it yourself."
"I"m going to have to pay for it myself anyway," I said.
She paused and, I'm guessing, took another look at the screen. "Do you have insurance?"
"No."
"Oh, well then," she brightened. "You can come in any time! How about Friday …" and she went on to schedule the appointment.
It's been a little more than half a dozen years since I had decent health insurance, three since I had any at all, and, while we didn't have a $7,500 deductible at my last two jobs, it was very near that figure.
Some things were covered, some things weren't, and, as someone pointed out on Facebook the other day, even the stuff that is covered still leaves you paying about a third.
When I started freelancing, I looked into some catastrophic health coverage, just something that would kick in if I found I had cancer or some other critical health crisis. I forget the numbers, but the monthly premiums were in four figures and represented about 60% of my gross income. And would only cover me once I'd met something like a $7,500 deductible.
And then the spigot would shut off again at a figure I knew wouldn't get me through a long stretch of chemo or repeated surgeries to try to remove tumors and suchlike.
This blog has readers all around the world who ought to be sitting slack-jawed in disbelieving horror as they read this. However, we overwhelm them with so much of our TV and other cultural offerings that I suppose they've heard all this before.
But as the plutocrats natter on about health care, I wonder if any of them know anything about real life, about what it's like down here in the trenches.
You're right, Mitt: We don't deny people health care when they have a heart attack. As you say, we take them to the ER and they get treatment.
Which everyone else pays for through higher insurance premiums and higher taxes.
But we routinely deny them health care before they have a heart attack, and, whether or not that is humane, it's fiscally irresponsible.
This isn't some semi-abstract conceptual thing, like the idea that, if we built more schools, we wouldn't have to build so many prisons. This is just nickels-and-dimes common sense, as old as the expression "Penny wise and pound foolish."
You paint your house so the wood doesn't rot. You put oil in your car so it doesn't throw a rod. Preventive care saves more than it costs.
Come on, you know that.
Let's be clear: I'm not whining about my own situation. If this were unique to freelancers, well, we simply wouldn't freelance, except at night, unless we were married to someone with a straight job and decent coverage.
This is about a whole lot of other people, including many who, unlike we artistes, have not voluntarily chosen to place themselves at the bottom of the pile.
I'd like it to be changed.
But, more than that, goddammit, I'd like it to be acknowledged.
Because, first of all, we haven't all "chosen" this lifestyle and I'm sick of hearing rhetoric based on the idea that people can just put on their shoes and go find a job that pays $60,000 with benefits, if only they'd show some initiative.
Second, because we're not at the bottom of the pile. I don't qualify for any assistance and there are any number of people in this same bracket. We can get by, as long as the car doesn't break down, as long as nobody gets sick, as long as the rent stays the same. As long as we're not expected to save for retirement, emergencies or, god help us, vacations.
But there are people a few rungs down the ladder from us who aren't so fortunate, who aren't so resourceful, and to think that the current level of government assistance is making their lives bearable is wrong. To think, further, that it makes their lives comfortable is ignorance inspired by heartless arrogance.
I'm nowhere near where they are in life, but I can see it from here, a vantage point for which I consider myself blessed.
It's been 45 years since Bobby Kennedy visited the Mississippi Delta, and I wonder if any of those comfortable, self-assured bastards in the Beltway, airily prescribing their confident solutions, have any concept of how the other half lives?
And before Bobby, there was Jacob Riis. It's been nearly 125 years since he began trundling his photographic equipment through the slums of New York to show a callous America "How The Other Half Lives," and his work, along with that of the other muckrakers and reformers who sprang up in that era, stunned the nation out of its lethargic apathy.
For a while.
We got over it.
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