This poignant case FOR Medicare For All - Just showed up also Posted: Mar 19th, 2019 - 8:06 pm In Reply to: To try and diminish accomplishment of Pres. Trump economy, - anyone notice how
A few days ago I got a call from a coworker. His daughter’s fiancé had been found dead in his car. Over the phone, I could hear his daughter literally wailing in grief. The sound was gut-wrenching, over-the-top, like she’d fallen off a cliff and kept falling and screaming the whole way down. She is four months pregnant with the dead man’s child.
I saw my coworker again today and we spoke at length about what had happened. The fiance was a young man, Malik, only twenty-two years old. He’d had a seizure while sitting in his car outside of his house. In another of the endless sadistic practical jokes that America seems to delight in, his insurance company had kicked him off their roster. He couldn’t afford his epilepsy medication and had had to stop taking it a few days prior to his fatal episode.
As far as I’m concerned, private insurance companies murdered this young black father. They might as well have walked up to him in that car and shot him full of bullets; the end result would have been exactly the same.
America is a cruel nation. How else can we explain the anguish it causes by hoarding away life-saving necessities from its poor and working class? It’s as though our government gets a sick thrill out of making children into orphans. All I’ve ever seen this government do is kick people off of their insurance. Deny them treatment. My own daughter was kicked off of her insurance. My stepson was kicked off of his. My partner, nearly five months pregnant, will be kicked off of her insurance within the next month. It’s completely out of control. People talk about the government being inefficient, but if you’ve ever been on Medicaid you know they’re incredibly efficient when it comes to purging people from their rolls.
Tonight, the insurance executives and their paid politicians will go pull up to their driveways, walk through the front doors of their homes, take their shoes off, and kick back after a long day of sending poor people to their death. They may flick on the television and sigh a knowing, exasperated sigh, or perhaps even feel a flush of indignation when they hear that socialists are trying to make healthcare into a human right.
One day I hope we show up on their doorsteps with a whole army of working class militants behind us, demanding justice. That day, they’ll have to answer for what they did to Malik and to millions of others like him.
Now, I am angry again. I don't care about the selfish fears (greed) of the Conservatives. We need Medicare For All.
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