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Back in 1995, I had both of my hips replaced and spent a month in a hospital and rehab center. Fortunately, my insurance covered the substantial cost. One day as I was pushing myself to learn how to go up and down steps on my new bionic joints, I overheard a couple of the rehab staffers chatting about the release of another patient. The doctor said something like, "We can send him home Friday."The other said, "But he's really not ready to be home on his own," the other person said. "I know," sighed the doctor, "but he doesn't have enough insurance to stay longer."
Not long after, an elderly man was sent home, crying and protesting that he wasn't ready to take care of himself and had no one to help him.
That experience has been on my mind a lot as I listened to the speeches at this year's Democratic National Convention.
In her rousing speech to the Democratic National Convention tonight, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged to return to the US Senate next year to work for passage of a universal health care law, echoing Monday's night's pledge by Sen. Edward Kennedy. Clinton and Kennedy have spent a lifetime working toward that prize. Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain have advanced proposals that that say will move us closer to that elusive goal.
If everyone is so committed to health care reform, why has it been so hard to achieve? And how likely is it that the candidates' proposals will finally fix this mess? If you really want to know the answers to those questions, Trudy Lieberman's series on health care policy is must reading. She's written a series illustrating the potential impact of the candidates' proposals on real people. In her opening post, she faults journalists and bloggers' coverage of the issue:
So far, mainstream media coverage of health care during the campaign has been characterized by stenographic reporting—simply transcribing what the candidates say, buzz words and all. Blogosphere coverage has trended the opposite direction—way too much wonk talk, angels dancing on the head of a pin-type stuff. What have been missing are the people stories.
Another article exposes the agenda behind those "Harry and Louise" ads that seem to call for a bi-partisan grass roots approach to health care that makes it easier for people who are uninsured or uninsured to buy private insurance. This "grass roots" group is actually an alliance between a business lobbying group and a hospital trade association that used a similar advertising campaign to help sink the Clinton health-care initative 15 years ago.
Most recently, Lieberman blogged about a Washington Post story on Michelle Obama's role in an initiative by the University of Chicago Medical Center to get poor, uninsured patients to get their non-emergency health care from community health clinics instead of hospital emergency rooms. A lot of health care professionals would support that in principle, the problem is that the clinics are woefully underfunded and understaffed.
Lieberman noted that the McCain campaign is using the story to argue that Barack Obama talks about expanding health care while his wife's actions made it harder for poor Chicagoans to get that care. But Liberman said that the press should extract a different lesson from the episode:
I agree the media should be all over the issue—but not because of Obama’s hypocrisy. The scenario in Chicago is being played out in big cities all over the country.
Which brings me back to my friend from rehab. I still wonder what happened to him. I've been told that my hip prostheses will have to be replaced one day as well, and I worry whether my health insurance will be adequate when that day comes. Trudy Lieberman's work doesn't ease my worries, but it is lifting the veil on the confluence of business and political circumstances that contribute to this growng crisis.
