Left Coast Cowboys

I’ve listened and listened to the ever ratcheting rhetoric about the increasingly vilified Public Option in the Health Care reform bill. And what strikes me is that the vast majority of the people fear mongering about it fall into two distinct camps: 1) those who believe “all government is bad, nothing the government runs can be good or efficient” (my response to this later) and 2) people who are actually currently enjoying the benefits of government run health care coverage but don’t want to share it with others. That latter camp would include the Seniors who are inexplicably waving “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” signs at Town Hall scream fests. So whose hands do you think are giving Medicare to you? Yup, it’s that bad old government and the simple gist of the Public Option is: Medicare style coverage for all SHOULD THEY CHOOSE TO TAKE THAT OPTION. So you like your Medicare coverage? Let’s extend it to your non-senior neighbors. If they don’t want it, they can choose Blue Cross or a private insurance program. Period. End of story.

Then there are the Congresspeople who have the same low cost, full coverage plan that is available to our military, but don’t want to make that sort of comprehensive coverage — which doesn’t recognize restrictions like pre-existing conditions — available to their constituents. Why is nobody standing up and demanding that any Congressperson who is bent on denying a government coverage option to his constituents must immediately and voluntarily relinquish his or her government coverage and place him or herself at the tender mercies of commercial insurance companies and big pharma?

You don’t hear of anyone taking that step. Because let me tell you, that coverage your Congressperson enjoys? Well, I grew up and thrived under that same coverage thanks to my career Army officer father. It was a coverage plan that continued to provide for my father until his death and still covers my mother. It is excellent and comprehensive coverage that is unmatched in the private sector.

Don’t believe me? Well, under Obama’s plan, you will be free to chose something else. And if you really think it will be that bad, well what’s the fear? If it’s crap, no one will chose it and it will die. Why do you think Big Pharma and the insurance industry are fighting this tooth and nail? Because they know it’s going to be better, more comprehensive and a real challenge to them. They’re scared shitless.

But back to my point, here’s what that government backed coverage did for my family:

1) It deducted a reasonable premium from my father’s pay (which was adjusted fairly over the years in response to his increasing salary).

2) It covered the entire family, including medicine, completely and with no co-pays and with nothing excluded.

3) It allowed us to go to whatever doctor or hospital we wanted — including some of the best in the Nation such as Mass General, Stanford and UCSF — and it covered even experimental and cutting-edge cancer and heart treatments.

Here is what it didn’t do:

1) It didn’t make me, as a teenager, run out and get an abortion (even though that would have been covered.)

2) It didn’t ration our health care. In fact, it covered second opinion visits at a variety of different institutions as well as treatments such as cutting edge pediatric heart procedures for me as a child and aggressive and comprehensive cancer treatments for my father toward the end of his life.

3) It didn’t make me put my parents in front of a Death Panel, even though it offered comprehensive End of Life Counseling.

Mr. Wilson, the office deserves respect, even if you didn't vote for the man. Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Want to know what End of Life Counseling is? Well, let me tell you because I’ve been through it. When my father’s cancer had spread to Stage Five and it was found that his liver was slowly shutting down, we were able to have a consultation with medical professionals and receive comprehensive and valuable information about our options. Should we keep on a round of invasive procedures and hospitalizations which would, at best, prolong my father’s life for maybe a few months? Or was there an alternative? Turns out there were a lot of options for home health care that would allow my father to end his life with dignity in his own home, surrounded by family and without being hooked up to tubes. He participated in the discussions of these options and he chose the latter. We could only have made that choice comfortably with the help of health professionals — whose services were fully covered by our government-backed insurance program.

Once my father had chosen Hospice Care, we were provided with home health care nurses to help with his care as well as counseling to help the family through the process. When he died, my father left a family in grief, but not in debt.

It was a coverage that, by its nature, seemed to have some built in efficiencies. Because it was so comprehensive, my parents never missed a check up from well-baby through our teen years. We went to the doctor for every cough, sore throat or health concern. As a result, we naturally fell into a pattern of preventative medicine, getting things checked before they became larger, more expensive and less curable issues. My mother, who has major lung issues (which were a pre-existing condition from her teenage years) has received such good care that, while most other people with her condition are walking around tethered to an oxygen tank, she’s riding horses on trail rides into her late Seventies. Could more be done to promote preventative medicine? Sure. But when you don’t have to weigh the cost of a check up against the cost of dinner, you are naturally more likely to go every six months.

This is NOT the way to change things, my friends.

It is the sort of coverage that should be available to all Americans. It’s the sort of coverage that is available to all citizens of France — who according to the World Health Organization have the world’s best health care. In fact, the WHO rates 36 countries ahead of the US in health care effectiveness. How do they rate that? On statistics such as longevity, infant mortality, major disease rates, etc. Okay, you can get all patriotic and split hairs, wave the flag and say our hospitals and doctors are better than any damned Frogs’. Maybe they are. The problem is, not all of us have access to that highest level of care. Too many of us put off doctors visits until it’s so bad we can’t avoid it. At which point, it usually costs much more to address and the problem may be not so easily cured. And that’s when many are forced to make that tough choice between dinner and health care. Or home, college funds, investments, savings and health care.

You want to talk about rationing of health care? Baby, we have that now. It’s rationing by price and by the whim of the insurance companies. On the military plan and the plan your Congressperson enjoys? No rationing. Well, there must be some point where the plan says “we just can’t cover this.” I’m not sure where that point would be. We had my father go through multiple aggressive courses of chemotherapy, radiation, surgery and other treatments for his cancer. At a certain point, we were told that the cancer had spread so aggressively that his liver was failing, which is pretty much the beginning of the end for a 78 year old man. Would they have denied us a liver transplant if we’d demanded it? Possibly. But my father didn’t ask for it. He weighed his options and his expected lifespan. No matter what was done, the outside estimate at that stage was 6 weeks (which he exceeded by sheer determination). He made the choice, backed by the honest information provided by End of Life Counseling, to live the last days of his life without recovering from yet another procedure that wasn’t promising many more weeks.

My final parting shot? That whole argument that government is bad and government can’t possibly do anything efficient. My friend, government is not some big entity in a parallel universe. Because we live in a democracy, our government is us. Go ahead and rail against it. That’s your right under the freedom of speech we enjoy here. But be honest and accept part of the responsiblity for anything you don’t like about government. Because its failings are your failings. They are a direct result of our failure to research the issues thoroughly and make the informed choices that would put representatives in office that will carry out our will. It is our failure, once those representatives are in office, to demand accountability from them — on a constant basis. It’s our tendency, when our party isn’t in power, to vilify the opposition. No matter who gets elected, they are sworn in to represent ALL their constituents. Barack Obama is everyone’s President, whether you pulled the lever or punched the chad for him or not. Let him know what you want — in a civil and proper manner. Let your representatives and Congresspeople know what is important to you.

Call me a starry eyed optimist, but I think it works. I did not vote for Ronald Reagan or George Bush Senior, but I had a long-standing correspondence with both of them. When they did something I didn’t like, I wrote to them. When they did something I liked, I wrote to them. They were my Presidents and I wanted them to hear my voice. And you know what? They wrote back. Several times. I still have the letters. Well, I’m sure it was low-level functionaries that wrote back. But in the aggregate, I think such communication is effective. Did I make a difference? Who knows? But I bet if there were hundreds of thousands of us who wrote to them as I did, they would have listened. On a more direct level, I helped elect the local, regional and state officials that I thought would more directly represent my interests and keep these Presidents accountable.

I have to accept that a small part of Bush Jr.’s failures must be laid at my door. I allowed myself to give in to the whole “I didn’t vote for this guy, I hate him” trap. I dropped out of active citizenry for awhile. Maybe if I, and thousands of Democrats like me, had stayed respectfully participatory, things would have been different. I won’t make that mistake again, no matter who is elected next.

What didn’t I do during the Reagan and Bush Senior years? I didn’t storm into town meetings and shout people down. I researched the issues and I wrote respectful but firm letters outlining what I wanted and expected from my Presidents. If the return letters I received back weren’t written by Ronnie or George themselves, they were answered by someone who actually read them. Because they always answered the exact points I’d raised with specific thought-out answers. It’s a start. And, as a participatory democratic effort, it beats painting a Hitler mustache on a Presidential portrait.

But I’m a long way from my main point. Which is that the government can indeed run an efficient, fair and medically sound coverage option. My entire family — and every military family I grew up with — is proof of that. Ask me any questions you want about my experiences. I’d be glad to share. If you’ve been covered by a similar government-backed coverage option and haven’t had my positive experience, I want to hear about it.

I think we’re all closer to a solution that we think. And I think it can be done without shouting and violence.

I’ll leave you with this food for thought.

Need a common-sense, plain-spoken explanation of the Public Option? Robert Reich lays it all out in two minutes:

Here’s conservative pundit Bill Kristol admitting that the government runs a first-class health care coverage program for the military, but the average American doesn’t deserve it.

Ready for a laugh (through your tears)? Here’s Paul Hipp with a rousing response to the US status as the Number 37th in health care (as rated by the World Health Organization).

Since the news has become All Michael Jackson All The Time, it was inevitable, no matter how I tried to resist, that I would have to put up a Michael Jackson post. But this won’t be the one you expect.

Full disclosure, I was never a huge fan, so my mind is free to roam, when the subject is Michael Jackson, to other tangentially related topics. Today, it’s Generations. It all started when a self-identified Generation X blogger I read reprinted an article about how the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were a great loss for Generation X. Yet, she was focussing only on the Billie Jean years. I know she’s young enough that she probably has no memory of Michael as part of The Jackson Five and bopping out to Rockin’ Robin and ABC, especially since Michael burst on the scene in 1968, a year after this blogger was born. Now me, I remember those songs, because I am exactly Michael Jackson’s age. (Well, at least chronologically. The latest news is making it clear he was a very different physical and mental age.) But are Michael and me Generation X? What generation are we? I’ve always been confused on this point.

Let’s get some ground rules down. Although some reports have the Baby Boomers born from 1945 to 1965 and others peg Gen X from 1961 to 1981, I categorically reject that. If a generation is defined as a group of people, who by birth time, have a set of shared experiences, cultural and historical references and rituals, how can a generation encompass a group where the eldest could have given birth to the youngest? No, for me a generation can’t be more than 10 years — Zeitgeist Siblings, if you will. Maybe in some periods it extended a bit beyond ten years, maybe in other times of rapid cultural shifts, it’s a bit less than ten years. But ten years is pretty much the standard. That lets those who were born in the eleven years between 1916 and 1927 qualify as the Greatest Generation. They came of age during the Great Depression and were all of them old enough to have fought in World War Two. That lets my parents out of that group as both were in early high school and junior high by 1945. So, even though my parents remember the Depression and World War II, they weren’t trying to gain employment during the former or fighting or waving off a contemporary to fight in the latter. That makes a big divide between them and people a little bit older. I’d say that dividing line marks the end of one generation and the start of another.

What defines a Baby Boomer? How about if you were old enough to contemplate hitching to Woodstock. Even if you were just 15 and you had a curfew. Poster photo: Shelly Rusten.

Likewise, I don’t see myself as a Baby Boomer. I remember Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Ina Gadda Davida. My baby sitters used to play those songs. I remember Viet Nam. But it wasn’t a war my contemporaries fought. My father did. I knew someone who joined the SDS. She was the much, much older sister of a friend and when she came to our house, she sat with the adults. My brother, her sister and I sat at the children’s table. So I’d say, that generational divide was pretty clear.

Just as the Baby Boomers like to claim they invented everything from Rock to Civil Disobedience, Gen X, at least in many of the articles I’ve read, screams loudly that they brought down the Berlin Wall. They also claim Grunge as their music. Desert Storm was “their war”. If those cultural touchstones define them,  let’s figure out who was 18 to 29 around that time. Well, the youngest veterans of Desert Storm would have to have been born in 1973 to be 18 at the time of the war. Grunge hit it big in the early 90s, so lets cap the generation at those who had not yet reached thirty by 1992 — the year after Nevermind hit it big and Nirvana played the MTV Awards. That’s people who were born no earlier than 1963. So can we peg Generation X at roughly 1963 to 1973?

If you believe Gen Xers' hype, they brought down the Berlin Wall. By listening to Grunge and voting for Reagan.

So if Gen X is 1963-1973 and the Baby Boomers are 1945 to 1955 — old enough for the Summer of Love (1967),  Woodstock (1969) and still in danger of being drafted (the Draft ended in 1973) — where does that leave those of us born between 1955 and 1963?

Wikipedia has an answer. We are Generation Jones.

“Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970s made this slang word [Jonesing] popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.”

Yup, that’s us. Remember the Recession and the Gas Crisis? Yeah, we couldn’t tune in, turn on and drop out then come back from the Peace Corps or a commune and walk right into a good job. And we were struggling out of college for that first professional job in a tougher time than a later generation that could leap from barista to Vice President in the Dot Com era. Apparently we always were and still are jonesing for a better deal.

But I’ll tell you what, Generation X. Michael Jackson, for better or worse, is OURS. You might have been just old enough to go to the roller rink and skate to Billie Jean and Thriller. Yeah, we did that too. But we were also in elementary school and junior high boppin’ to Rockin’ Robin with a similarly aged Michael, who at that time was a Black kid sporting a purple pimp hat and a polyester jump suit.

And you know who else we have in our camp?

His Barackness, The Big O, born 1961.

It’s a bit late, but, as Generation Jones, we’re finally coming into our own.