Sunday, Oct. 25, 2009

Robert B. Simpson: Health care twaddle enough to make you sick

It’s one of the most contentious issues to be debated in years. Even the title is contentious. Is it a national health program? Health reform? Health insurance reform? Universal medical coverage? Pick the one you like. Or the one you don’t like and can use as a club. Or make up one of your own.

Given the complexity of the subject, it would have been good to have reasonable public debate over the summer. There are elements of the central issue — how to get access to sensible health care for more Americans while slowing the drive of the current patchwork system toward insolvency — that need to be aired. Citizens have questions, and their questions deserve answers, not posturing.

To be fair, when reasonable answers are given, they are often not accepted. Many people are unwilling to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions about what is being hammered out in congressional committees. It’s much easier and more entertaining to swallow the nonsense peddled around the Internet by the lunatic fringe than to actually search for facts.

But too many times, reasonable answers are not given, even to serious questions. Watching some politicians addressing the public makes you feel sorry for their constituents.

When all the health care town hall meetings and political gamesmanship started, I was glad Georgia would no longer be embarrassed by the outrageous outbursts of Cynthia McKinney, Democrat, one of our former, and best known, U.S. representatives. She’s out of office now, so I breathed a sigh of relief. Now, I thought, we could just worry about some of our less flamboyant politicians, many of them obnoxious and wrong-headed, but not totally over the top. I was in for a surprise.

Are you familiar with Representative Paul Broun, Republican, from North Georgia? I wasn’t, until someone sent me a video shot at a public meeting at which Mr. Broun gave his take on national health reform, the gist of which seemed to be that we don’t need any such reform, we just need some tax breaks here and there. Tax breaks for doctors was the solution he offered to a doctor who told him how many patients she is seeing, with serious diseases, who are uninsured and unable to pay, and how outrageous she thinks that is.

Another of Mr. Broun’s constituents said he suffers from major depressive disorder. He had tried to kill himself and was given a prescription for expensive medicine which he cannot afford, as he has no health insurance. So he has continued to bear the immense suffering of clinical depression. Mr. Broun’s solution? Everybody in America, he said, can get treatment at the emergency room. What this has to do with paying for prescriptions is unclear.

Anyway, I’ve spent some time in emergency rooms. A lot of time. One visit lasted eleven hours, another nine hours. A few others were relatively brief at only three or four hours each. And I can state that, far from being a place I’d go to get treated for depression, the emergency rooms I’ve been in are where I’d send someone if I wanted to throw him permanently into a depressive state.

I’ll say one thing for Dr. Paul Broun — yes, this man is a doctor, too, in real life! — he was able to plow straight ahead and keep passing out nutty responses with a straight face and in a bored monotone, even as his audience laughed and hooted in derision. You got the impression that someone living in another universe had somehow dropped into a public gathering and begun responding to questions that had totally different meanings in the alien’s native language.

So don’t wait any longer for serious public discussion. Our society having lost its taste for civil discourse, we are left to dig out the facts for ourselves. Actually, they are available with a little work. But apparently not from our Georgia politicians. Certainly not from Dr. Broun.

I had thought that, for sheer embarrassment power, nobody could match former Representative McKinney.

Guess I was wrong.