“Giving to those who don”™t pay into the system has not been properly looked at. It”™s causing consternation and anger.”
When the speaker is a TV talking head, a person can effectively say that”™s what he or she does to earn a living. When the speaker is an Episcopal priest who has plied the spiritual corridor between New York and Delaware for 25 years, the words are truly worth examining because something has struck a chord very deep in the American psyche.
The priest ”“ Mother Denise Pariseau-Mantell ”“ does not arrive with the pitchforks and pine-knot torches of some in the health care fight. She does arrive screaming ”“ never mentions the president. Rather, she comes with cancer ”“ three different types as a result of working at the World Trade Center site after the attacks ”“ and with the desire to help her sister Andrea Monroe navigate a world of denied coverage for Monroe”™s husband, a disabled worker with the state Bridge Authority.
A humbly attired Episcopal priest whose brother-in-law is seeing the harsh realities of our system, one would think, should be front and center and arms linked in the cause for universal coverage, but Pariseau-Mantell also has been through the mill in the last several years and she calls the system “broken.”
“We have to be honest with what we can do,” she said in White Plains Aug. 10. “There is a lot of excess bureaucracy and an enormous amount of money that goes into nonsense.”
Those who”™ve been ill have always known what an ordeal it can be: cancers, difficult pregnancies and broken legs all take their tolls to varying degrees and have their own scales of severity. The world today, however, adds the nausea-inducing possibility of destitution, followed by decreased care, followed by ”“ take your pick ”“ death, the poorhouse or perhaps a lucky Powerball win to set everything right. Pariseau-Mantell said seniors with whom she speaks are particularly concerned about what the future holds.
“It s*cks,” Pariseau-Mantell politely half-mouths and half-whispers concerning the system.
It”™s an assertion certainly every business owner in the land could make. Even those who can insure their workers must increasingly say, “No raises this year ”“ health care ate them.”
With that as a starting point, we all ought to lower the volume, listen to all sides and try to hammer out a plan that helps all without bankrupting any. Opponents of reform often have little regard for how deeply vested the government already is in medicine and all the good it does in that arena with vital programs like Medicare. Proponents must acknowledge the cost of reform ”“ we”™re talking the T-word ”“ could sink thousands of businesses and hobble those that remain, leaving us worse off than where we are now.
Inaction is not an option. Accommodations for all can and must be accomplished; the costs are about to leap hugely as the baby boomers get their hips and knees replaced ”¦ for starters.
As free marketeers, we”™d like to see a greater dividend on the healthy side of the equation, where those who eat and recreate wisely become the cohort to which others are drawn ”¦ not because mom says so, but for financial reasons. That same accountability ”“ shared sacrifice toward a worthy goal ”“ should come from the uninsured, as well, acknowledging just how hard others work to pull their health sleighs. We”™d like to see everyone pay his fair share, naturally. Such efforts won”™t save from woe the 9/11 responders such as Pariseau-Mantell or leave the world without sick children, but to even the casual observer “healthy behavior” seems often to be missing from the health care equation; honesty, too. They”™re missing from the debate, too, and that”™s hurting, not helping.
