Vocabulary Expansion

You know you’re in LA for the new year when you hear major ordnance going off within driving distance, or maybe, uh, walking distance? Not that I’m going to go out there to make sure.

A recent and sudden rash of strokes in the family has landed me here for the holidays, where, as my friend Greg puts it, I am engaged in an intense round of compressed care-giving. The good news is no one died. But you’d be amazed how exhausting it can be cleaning out kitchens for the newly-mobility-limited, and visiting nursing homes – especially when the relatives in question are just not interested in residing in said nursing homes, or acknowledging their new lack of mobility….

Do not go gently into that good night!

So, not to over-flog an already dead horse, but, really, you NOT dying from your sudden catastrophic illness shouldn’t be the worse thing that can happen to your family.

I like California. It’s a great place – except for three not small problems – Homelessness, Medical Bankruptcy, and the high high cost of Higher Education.

Realistically, I could probably extend that comment to cover the entire US (except for perhaps Mass., which I’m told has some kind of universal health care & reasonably good schools).

The weather in Ireland makes me sick. Literally. Having left home two weeks ago I am still recovering from my regular annual dose of Damp Irish Winter Lung Rot.

But my heart is sickened at the idea of Medical Bankruptcy – a term I just learned this week.

Apparently, hard working, productive citizens routinely lose their homes, their jobs & and their marriages over something as seemingly innocuous as a nasty mole that requires Chemotherapy.

Your illness needn’t be life-threatening to cost you your whole life – and if you really expected that savings account to pay for your kid’s education, well then, you should have worn a LOT more sun screen, and been born with better genes.

A friend who happens to be a Diagnostic Oncologist in LA tells me Medical Bankruptcy is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. How frightening is that?

Another friend who happens to be a consultant educator for Make Play Learn, as well as a very experienced & brilliant teacher, tells me her health insurance costs FIFTEEN THOUSAND dollars a year. That’s equally scary.

We Irish get all irritable at the notion of paying anything more than one thousand a year for very similar coverage – and hey, the truth is, we don’t even have to buy it, because we have universal health care. The waiting lists tend to be long, but being dying will usually get you bumped to the head of the list, and if you really just can’t wait, well, you do always have the option to just pay to be treated privately. The system is not perfect. Mistakes get made. But it’s a helluva lot more humane than signing over 20-40% of your gross pay on the gamble that you MIGHT get sick.

We Irish get sick and call our General Practitioner, who asks about our pet/kid/spouse/etc., and then charges us 50 euros to look at our tongues & write a prescription. Californians get sick and go to their HMO, where they might (or might not) be seen by a doctor who knows them. They still pay the same 50 bucks, but it’s only a co-payment, and their insurance picks up the extra 500. They get the same 15 minutes of attention, and probably a less effective drug (because the more effective drug is sooo much more expensive that the insurance company just won’t pay for it until the MD proves that the cheaper drug didn’t work).

Americans pay more for drugs than any other nation in the world. In other words, the exact same drug costs more in the US than it does in the UK, Ireland, Australia…. Why? Because health care is a major industry here.

As I understand it, there are two options being considered now. The Lower House wants to institute a plan where government is where the buck stops. In other words, Uncle Sam would cover all citizens who don’t already have health coverage. It’s not Universal Care, but it seems like the next best option.

The Senate seems to prefer a sort of free market approach, where citizens with no insurance must buy it from private insurance companies, but thru some sort of exchange. This of course brings in the ideas of regulation, deregulation, reasonable VS. justifiable costs, profit margins, and many more headaches that will doubtless suffice to ensure that universal healthcare is NOT a real option for Joe Public any time in this lifetime, and the lawyers have enough work to keep them gainfully employed for the rest of the century.

The Irish system isn’t perfect, and there are lots of things I dislike about Ireland – but hey, we don’t set the sick adrift on melting financial ice rafts and shove them off into the homeless abyss.

Universal health care won’t be cheap, but maybe the issue is how do you quantify having (or choosing not to have) a social sense of human decency?

If you could choose to pay an extra 10% in taxes and be reasonably assured that Medical Bankruptcy would mostly cease to exist, would you? Or would you rather keep your disposable income?

Occasionally, when reading discussions on LinkedIn, I’ve been known to remind a few folks in Silicone Valley (who claim to be all that plus a bag of chips), that while yes, we all envy their home-grown business culture, we simultaneously DON’T envy their rampant problem with homelessness. As I’ve said before, I’d actually rather that my taxes subsidise lazy lumps on the dole – so long as I can trust that those same lazy lumps won’t be sleeping in my doorway when I try to go home.

The questions really are that simple. Honestly.

PS: — in case this all sounds a wee bit too judgemental, I’d like to add that on the subject of insurance, it has been revealed publicly that the Irish catholic leadership actually bought insurance to cover themselves in the event that victims of clerical sexual abuse might win law suits against the church &/or it’s various orders.

Can you imagine the depravity of those actuarial tables? And yes, I am involved in taking action against the Irish Gov’t for their negligence & outright refusal to provide universal access to non-catholic schools for parents who are not catholics. Yes, really, some 97% of state-funded Irish schools are catholic; I think that’s unrealistic when (according to the church’s own polls) less than 48% of parents would choose to send their child to a catholic school, if given the choice.

I realise this is completely off the subject, but my New Year’s resolution is to tell more people about this, so if you want to know more, get in touch.