I appreciated your astute Facebook post starting with your granddaughter’s “mine!” phase. But missing from your post was one major area of our cultural life that has been unashamedly, in every sense of the word, “mine-d” — healthcare. It really hit me hard last night. My doctor ordered an emergency brain scan, saying she would not allow me to fly anywhere until she could be assured that, following a recent fall, there were no vessels bleeding in my brain.
Test results were good! Discussion with CT tech was ‘bad’! The tech went on and on about how Obamacare had “destroyed the healthcare system in this country”, and about how lucky I was to have been seen so soon, and lucky I didn’t have to share the waiting room with the hoards people Obamacare now allowed to get medical insurance. (Actually, the waiting room was, except for me, empty.)
Taken aback, I described how alot of the folks I see in my medical clinics, had been UNinsured, and therefore, had suffered horrible deterioration of their health…For example, young people with diabetes who, lacking medicines and care, had lost parts of their limbs. Folks whose cancers had metastasized and who were now dying because they had been unable to afford care early on in their disease. Because of their untreated and worsening illnesses, they lost their jobs, lost homes to foreclosure, lost their sense of serenity to debilitating depression.
The tech’s comments seemed to me symptomatic of our deeper, broader culture of ‘entitlement’, fueled by erroneous anti-Obamacare propaganda. Amazingly, some of the patients with whom I had wept, hearing about how they suffered from lack of treatment, have themselves bought the message that “Obamacare is ruining our nation’s healthcare.” While it may be true that there are now more folks insured and, therefore, providers are more heavily burdened, the solution is surely not to deny decent healthcare to our brothers and sisters….to deny our brethern so that the ‘fortunately insured’ can enjoy what they consider “mine, mine, mine”
