NEWSDISABILITIES

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an industry-backed group, is becoming well known for funding anti-regulation political campaigns. Change.org's environment blog covered the Commerce's efforts to put pro-oil propaganda in schools and their lawsuits against the EPA, including one that challenges regulation to reduce childhood asthma-causing smog.

When it comes to health, the group doesn't just attack health care reform. One of their campaigns, "This Way to Jobs," makes the case for doing away with workplace regulations, putting worker health and safety in serious jeopardy.

The main tactic behind the "This Way to Jobs" campaign is, not surprisingly, scare tactics and distortion of facts -- that increased workplace safety regulation (and almost any regulation) is a huge burden on businesses, and hurts our economy and job creation.

Their token businesses person, Ronald Myers of Hot Shot Equipment, Inc., claims that safety regulation forced him out of his iron gate manufacturing business in Arizona.

Catherine Calhoun remembers the day with exacting clarity. It was October 16th, 2006. When she dropped her four-year-old son, Billy, off at school, she noticed he was limping. At first, the St. Francisville, La., mom didn't think too much of it. But when the limp was still there later that day, she took him to a doctor. Just in case.

After numerous X-rays, the doctor came back with the news -- Billy had multiple lesions throughout his leg bones. Another blow: the doctor didn't know why. Cancer? A bone disorder?

Wanting answers, Calhoun took Billy to New Orleans Children's Hospital, a two hour drive away. There, the doctors and medical students asked to see Billy's X-rays. Did he have birthmarks? Indeed, large cafe-au-lait spots that previous doctors had dismissed as normal. But these, combined with his X-rays, were telltale signs of a disorder the physicians had studied just that week: McCune-Albright Syndrome.

The diagnosis was bittersweet for Calhoun, a lawyer who has taken on her child's disease as her only client. His condition had a name, but it didn't have a cure. Resulting from a chance genetic mutation that happens while still in the womb, the disease can affect bones, skin and the endocrine system. Though the symptoms differ from person to person, usually people have fibrous dysplasia, where normal bone tissue is replaced with abnormal growth, leading to weak bones prone to fracture and deformity. In addition to the birthmark-like pigmentation, endocrine issues can result in growth and sexual development abnormalities, including precocious puberty, where girls as young as four menstruate.

In the past two weeks, I've read two poignant first-person accounts of living with chronic health problems. The first came from the film critic Roger Ebert, who, after several surgeries for jaw cancer, can no longer speak, eat or drink. The disability has changed his relationship not just with food, but with thought. Just imagining an icy root beer brought back a lost memory of visiting a drive-in restaurant with his father 60 years ago. (The piece reminded me of an Esquire article from the fall called "The Man Who Couldn't Eat" written by a man with Crohn's disease who is forbidden from eating because his digestive system can't handle food. There's a hilarious scene in which he's caught by his wife and children licking the salt off a leftover French fry.)

In the New York Review of Books, historian Tony Judt matter-of-factly chronicles the "cockroach-like existence" of living with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. "By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic," he writes. "With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me." Judt, who dictated the piece, plans to publish several more.

The healthy and otherwise afflicted should find these accounts fascinating. While Ebert and Judt are writing, in part, to cope with chronic discomfort, you can expect an acute case of your own.

Photo credit: NASA

As we start 2010, let’s take a moment to remember the latest victim of the US profits-before-healthcare mantra. This time we lost someone fairly high profile, who died on Christmas day while $70,000 in debt to an Athens, Georgia hospital that had placed a lien on his house. He was supposed to be insured. Then we’ll add a bit of needed levity courtesy of a former self-described insurance industry ‘spokesjerk’ – you can actually tell him where to go.

Vic Chesnutt, a folk-rocker with low-level quadriplegia due to a car accident at age 18 (his arms were partially functional, allowing him to play the guitar), died of an apparently deliberate overdose. He was 45. Chesnutt got his big break when Michael Stipe of R.E.M. discovered him and produced his first two albums. In 1996 the tribute album Sweet Relief II featured covers of his songs performed by none other than Madonna, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Indigo Girls, and more. Ironically, it was precisely because Chesnutt chose to be a productive member of society, cutting 16 albums and inspiring thousands, that he was prevented from acquiring comprehensive health insurance.

While on Face the Nation this weekend, Joe Lieberman said a lot of uninformed and just plain stupid things. That’s par for the course with him, he’s not all that bright. He certainly seems to want to go down in history as the primary cause of declining US health and prosperity. His latest folly: refusing to allow a Medicare buy-in for those aged 55-64, without even bothering to learn the details of the proposal – including an expected promising CBO score. Worse, though, he now has the CLASS Act in his sights as another supposedly expensive entitlement program that must go.

What is the CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports) Act? Ted Kennedy’s brainchild, it could be the saving grace for those with disabilities, allowing them to get needed long-term care without giving up their jobs or impoverishing themselves to qualify for Medicaid. Alternatively, it could save their children from giving up their jobs to care for them. Entirely self-funded and explicitly excluding the use of taxpayer money, the proposed program relies on voluntary payroll contributions. Participants must pay into the program for 5 years, and work for 3, before qualifying for benefits of $75 a day, about $27,000 per year.

As the Senate Finance Committee plunges ahead with the pageantry of its mark-up on a comprehensive health reform bill -- the last congressional committee to do so -- there’s a subplot to watch. Keep your eyes peeled for who benefits by the 564 proposed amendments: the various health care industries already making money off the system or the American people desperate for reform? Today was a textbook example of an amendment that directly pitted the interests of Big Pharma against you, the American taxpayer. In short, you didn’t do so well.

To give credit to the Baucus Bill, there is a provision wherein Medicare beneficiaries would get some relief from the “doughnut hole.” In Part D, beneficiaries’ prescription drugs are only covered for their first $2,700 per year. Once they reach that threshold, they have to pay for their drugs out of pocket until their total costs reach $6,154, at which point “catastrophic coverage” picks up for the remainder of their drugs. Being stuck in between those dollar figures is being stuck in the doughnut hole, and about 1/4 of the seniors on Medicare hit it each year. Making the elderly pay as much as $3,543 out of pocket on prescription drugs before their coverage kicks in again is obviously a huge problem. So Sen. Max Baucus negotiated a deal with the White House and with Big Pharma. The drug companies would kick in a rebate of up to $80 billion per year which would specifically be used for those stuck in the doughnut hole. Those in the hole would get drugs at half-price, which would be a huge relief for millions of seniors.

With that rebate came Big Pharma’s pledge to support reform, rather than fight it tooth and nail. They’ve been good on their word, running expensive but fairly milquetoast ads in support of a general notion of reform. But it came at a high cost -- an assurance that Pharma wouldn’t be asked to give up any more of their profits. The backroom deal was the exact opposite of what President Obama said would happen when he campaigned on health care, yet here we are.

Cut to today’s most notable moment in the mark-up: the amendment by Sen. Bill Nelson (of Florida, natch) which would have closed the doughnut hole entirely. Not only that, but the move would actually have saved more money than the current proposal. It also wouldn’t have been a radical move so much as re-establishing what had been the norm as recently as 6 years ago. It had broad Democratic support. And yet it failed to pass anyway.

Here’s the crux of Nelson’s amendment: about 8 million disabled Americans are simultaneously on Medicare and Medicaid, largely because of disability. They’re called “dual eligibles.” Overall, they tend to be low-income, unable to work because of their condition, and in the poorest level of health. They’re covered under Medicare, and use their eligibility for Medicaid to pay for their Medicare premiums for Part B. Now, before the Bush prescription drug bill in 2003, these folks’ prescription drugs were covered by Medicaid. Pharma got paid at Medicaid rates. As part of the Medicare Part D bill, however, Big Pharma got a raise – dual eligibles would be covered under Medicare. Pharma would get paid much higher rates and Uncle Sam would pick up the tab, minus a $1-$3 co-pay. How much higher were the rates? List price – or, if you prefer, “name your price.” Nelson’s amendment would simply return dual eligibles to being covered for prescription drugs under Medicaid, saving Uncle Sam a lot of money. How much? Enough to close the entire doughnut hole and still have $50 billion left over in savings.

Yeah, that’s your tax dollars we’re talking about.

You would expect the Republicans on the committee to vote against the amendment. After all, many of them had helped give Pharma that raise just a few years ago. But the amendment failed when three Democrats -- Tom Carper, Robert Menendez, and Max Baucus himself -- voted against it as well. All three of them cited the once top-secret deal as the reason for their vote.

“We don't represent their stockholders, we represent our stockholders, which are the taxpayers,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, who voted for the amendment. Apparently 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats weren’t so sure. And neither am I.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/ / CC BY 2.0)

One of the most common complaints from people trying as best they can to parse the different health care proposals is that there are too few articles that deliver the information in a straightforward, easy-to-read manner. You could always read the bills themselves, although, as Politico points out today, that experience may be more befuddling than enlightening for those not used to reading legal language. But the problem isn’t that these articles written to give a basic understanding of the proposals don’t exist. They just get lost in the flood of process stories, political horserace stories, and human interest stories than even Google can only help you so much.

That’s why it was my delight to find two truly excellent pieces of health reform analysis online today -- and why it’s my pleasure to recommend them to you.

Today’s Washington Post includes an article entitled “8 Questions on Health-Care Reform.” They are, in fact, the 8 most frequently asked “top level” questions. The language is very straightforward, and the whole article can be read in 10 minutes. It even has charts! Sample a snippet of the answer to Question 7, “What is likely to happen to my Medicare coverage under current proposals?”:

The vast majority of benefits provided by Medicare to 45 million senior citizens and people with disabilities would not be changed. Under the House bills, premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, known as Part D, would increase slightly. That increase would be offset by deep discounts on medications bought in the coverage gap known as the "doughnut hole."

Overall, the result would be lower out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs for most seniors, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Read the full article here… seriously, read it.

Towards the end of the spring, we saw a flurry of activity to actually create Republican “alternative” plans. They didn’t get much traction. Many of them were like Rep. Roy Blunt’s, which was barely four pages of bullet points in Microsoft Word that looked like it’d been written in about 25 minutes. A notable exception was the Patient’s Choice Act, which got some attention (and a rather lengthy analysis from me), but then disappeared from view. And by disappeared, I don’t just mean by the media -– Republicans largely stopped talking about them, too. In a post on The Health Care Blog, award-winning journalist Harris Meyer has a theory as to why:

Congressional Republicans have been blasting away all summer at the Democrats’ health reform legislation. But they might face heavy blowback if more Americans took a close look at two ambitious health reform bills sponsored by GOP lawmakers.

While the GOP plans include some worthy ideas, they have fatal policy flaws at their heart, largely related to insurance risk selection. Plus, they’re vulnerable to many of the same big-government political attacks leveled against the Democratic proposals. That may be the reason Republican lawmakers aren’t talking up their plans at the stormy health care town hall meetings they’re hosting across the country.

Read the rest of Meyer’s spot-on analysis here.

It really is our lucky day -- two great pieces of analysis that help shed some light not only on the proposals but on why someone might think they were a good or bad idea in the first place. They’re the pieces of health care journalism you’ve been waiting for.

(Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/shuttercat7/ / CC BY-ND 2.0)

Sen. Ted Kennedy, a fighter and legend in the United States Senate who referred to national health care as "the cause of my life," died last night after battling terminal cancer.  While Sen. Kennedy touched all our hearts and fought for a host of progressive issues, the cause that he's most closely associated with is winning the fight to give everyone "decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege."  The best way for us to honor his legacy now?  By finishing what he started and finally passing universal health care.

A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins imagines our souls crying, “What I do is me, for that I came.” What Ted Kennedy did is change how we looked at health care.  There are literally millions of people in this country who would not have coverage were it not for his lifetime of service in the United States Senate. There are millions more whose quality care has significantly improved, if not outright whose lives have been spared, because of the funding and the programs he was able to achieve. The question is what didn’t Ted Kennedy have a hand in when it came to health care?

• There are community-based health clinics, which he helped jump start through an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1966.
• There’s COBRA in 1985 – legislation that has helped millions of Americans this year keep their coverage even when they lost their job.
• There’s both the American Disabilities Act and the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act, two pieces of legislation that would be career-making for another senator on the issue of health care. Kennedy was a driving force for both of them in the same year – 1990.
• There’s HIPAA in 1996, the patient privacy and protection law, which also allows for portable coverage for about 25 million Americans, sponsored by Kennedy.
• There’s SCHIP in 1997, one of many Kennedy collaborations with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, which now covers over 10 million lower-income children.
• The dramatic legislative highlight of last year was Ted Kennedy, already afflicted with the brain cancer that would cut short his life, walking onto the floor of the Senate to be the decisive 60th vote for cloture on a vote to block a draconian cut to physician reimbursement in Medicare.
• And on, and on, and on.

Crying, “What I do is me, for that I came.”

Every time since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid that we have sought to expand health care coverage for our citizens, Ted was on the front lines. He bargained with the Nixon White House and nearly crafted a bipartisan compromise in the early 1970s. He feuded with Carter on health care, and launched his own run for the presidency in part to achieve that goal. When Bill Clinton’s plan was moved in the Senate, Ted was sponsor and lead advocate. And, of course, his still-untimely death comes at a moment when his last great work – one last bill to make good on the promise of his career, making quality, affordable health care a guaranteed right for every American, not a privilege based on income, or employment, or race, or class – stands at the crossroads in the United States Senate.

As we take on the task of completing his unfinished work, we have ringing in our ears his final statement on what has truly been the cause of his career, delivered in writing to celebrate that bill passing out of committee:

“Americans are an extraordinary people. We have created a nation of liberty and justice. We have defeated forces of oppression, and we have spread prosperity and progress across the globe. When the American people are on the march, there is no barrier that can resist them, no obstacle that can block their path.

“The American people are on the march once more, and they will not stop until quality, affordable health care is the birthright of every American. And we are with them every step of the way."

More posts on Change.org about Sen. Edward Kennedy's legacy:

• Animal Rights
• Gay Rights
• Genocide
• Global Health
• Global Warming
• Homelessness
• Humanitarian Relief
• Immigration
• US Poverty
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Women's Rights

(Photo credit:  redandgray on Flickr.)

Every Sunday, I’ve taken to posting the best of the best – the three must-reads or must-watches from this weekend.  This Sunday, I’m choosing three articles to fill in a big gap in my blogging.  Aside from one post earlier in the week on the protesters arriving in town halls to shout down debate on health care reform, I scarcely have mentioned the topic.  This is deliberate.  While the news might focus disproportionately on the loud and bullying minority, there are many other issues at play, issues that – unlike exemptions for unions, or death panels, or national IDs or what have you – actually exist in the bills themselves, and are worthy of debate and discussion.

Turns out it’s a good thing I did, because I don’t think I could have written about the health care rowdies any better than these three.  When you come right down to it, progressives and the rowdies actually agree on a lot of the same principles!  Let’s focus on the common ground, shall we?

(Side note:  Why do I have a picture of a massive pro-reform rally up?  Well, I keep hearing about how progressives aren’t mobilized for reform – I figured a picture was worth a thousand words.)

1.)    Daily Kos – “All Right, Republicans.  We Give Up.”

What to do when those showing up against reform are making demands against things that aren’t actually in the bill?  Blogger Strozeck has a great idea – capitulate!  Specifically, we should agree not to include things in the bill like:

1.  We will not euthanize your grandmother. This is the big one, and I really hope you guys appreciate how much of a concession this is on behalf of the progressive movement. Since the days of the Bull Moose Party, progressives have wanted nothing more than to slaughter old people by the millions. That much is obvious. After all, if we wanted senior citizens to have long and healthy lives, why would we have created Social Security and Medicare? Think about it. Death to grannies has long been the core of progressive policy, so it's not without some consternation that we give it up. So there: no euthanizing old people. You've got it.

2. Rahm Emanuel's brother will not kill Sarah Palin's baby. While this will require us to gut HR 3200 "America's Health Choices and Murder Sarah Palin's Baby Act of 2009," we're currently working with Henry Waxman to remove the extensive Sarah Palin's baby-killing provisions from the final bill. While this will probably cost us Andrew Sullivan's support, we recognize that this is a necessary sacrifice for securing broad bipartisan support of health care reform.

Read the whole blog post here.

2.)    Mark Halperin – “Halperin’s Take:  Why Everything About the Health Care Mobs Is a National Disgrace”

Regular readers of Mark Halperin’s “The Page” know that few enjoy reporting the blow-by-blow parry and thrust of politics than the man who originated ABC’s “The Note.”

During the election, Halperin helped hype the horserace first between Obama and Clinton, and then between Obama and McCain to the point of “edge of your seat” drama.  This is a man who kept giving out “weekly reviews” that indicated McCain was winning the news cycles consistently.  So it’s surprising – in a good way – that he’s unflinchingly down on the street theater surrounding health care.

My three favorite points:

4. It is very easy to disrupt a town meeting and the (apparent) reward is getting their requisite 15 minutes of fame on television news.
…

6. Debating whether a given mobster is "real" or "astroturf" is like debating who the third-best professional wrestler of the 1980s was.
…

9. Ask Republican members of Congress who voted for President Bush's massive prescription drug entitlement law how many of them read that bill before they voted in favor of it -- or how many bills they EVER read in their entirety.

Read the whole list.

3.)    Harold Pollack, “Have You No Decency?”

Although he’s clearly on the side of reform, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Harold’s commentary and his laidback and genuinely inquisitive style.  After all, I can’t think of many other bloggers who would write a post about his experiences talking to counter-protesters at a big pro-reform rally in Chicago to find out what’s motivating them.

But opportunistic politicians who have injected themselves into the limelight by spreading the most egregious false hoods about health care have prompted quite a different response in Harold – his ire.

First, these issues are quite separate from the main issues being debated in health reform. Under a single-payer system, a strong public plan, or under a libertarian’s privatized dream-system, we will still face fundamental dilemmas in caring for our loved ones, and ourselves. This is not merely or primarily a money issue. Like other forms of care, end-of-life care is sometimes wasteful or ineffective, but nobody is looking to skimp on or ration such care to finance health reform. Nor should they.

Second, health reform would address an equally fundamental dilemma of human dignity and human rights: millions of people’s lack of access to basic care. Many of these people are disabled or live with chronic illnesses. Over at Obsidian Wings, Publius yesterday noted the predicament of children with Down Syndrome denied health insurance because they have a preexisting condition.

Governor Palin writes: “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled.” It’s telling that she omitted one category: Poor people, whose care is now cruelly rationed in ways the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are trying to address in health care reform. Palin brings genuine moral passion to the issue of cognitive disability. I wish she would bring that same passion to the plight of uninsured patients forced to seek substandard, delayed care, or the millions of Americans facing the dual challenge of serious illness and large medical bills. If you live in any big city, go down to your local public hospital emergency room. You will probably find people in visible discomfort or illness languishing for hours. A society that cares about human rights and dignity would not tolerate this.

Read the whole blog post.

(Photo credit:  seiuhealthcare775nw on Flickr.)

You can read part 1 of “How Many More Have to Die Before We Fix Health Care?” and learn about Edith Speed here.

Between the work of the Institute of Medicine and the nonpartisan Urban Institute, we know that between 18,000 and 22,000 people die each year for no other reason than because they didn’t have health insurance.  It’s a staggering number considering so many of those deaths could have been prevented.  Each one of those numbers is a name.  Each one of those names was a family member, a friend, a co-worker, a student, a person.  For each of them, reforming health care so more people could afford to get the treatment they need when they needed wasn’t something politicians were rushing.

In fact, if we succeed this year, it will still come too late.

Angel “Inqy” Yates was an incredible artist with a stirring imagination (you can see her portfolio here).  She created a whole mythology of a post-World War III world for her series of Web-based comics, entitled “Wicked Alchemy.”  A small group of devoted fans knew she was gifted.  What they probably didn’t know was how many balls she was juggling at once.  As learned in a cartoon tribute by one of her instructors, “Even though she took a full course load, worked a full-time job, raised a family, and worked as a freelance artist, she always raised the bar and excelled in every course I had her in.”

This June -- less than 2 months ago -- she graduated, got her degree, and began working full-time doing what she loved.  She was in a situation common to artists – without health insurance from her employer and without enough money to buy her own plan.  In a note to her fans on her Web site – the last such note she would write – she revealed a new problem:

I'm also having odd health problems, which make me exhausted for no reason whatsoever. Hopefully.. hopefully.. we'll find a house soon, the health problems will go away on their own (since I have no health insurance at the moment to otherwise deal with them), and free time will return to me. It's going to be a long summer.

That was her public face.  On her personal blog, she was confused and frightened by her health problems, but didn’t have the money or the insurance to see a doctor.

After a month and a half, it grew to the point of being winded by even smaller walking spurts. I could climb two flights of stairs, but my chest felt as if someone were crushing it from all sides, and I couldn't get enough air. Which was silly, because I'd be listening to myself breathe hard, and the air was coming and going, it's just as if my lungs weren't registering that. It's a very hard thing to describe... Not like chest pain, although my chest hurt unbearably. Not like heart problems, although my heart would be pounding in my ears. Not like asphyxiating, since the air was coming and going. But for some minutes after exerting myself over two lousy flights of stairs, I could do nothing but stand there and gasp and pant heavily….

I just don't know what to do. I really don't... Can it still be from stress? I still have plenty of it... I graduated, and got a job, and things are falling into place. But there's still so much to worry about... the lack of health insurance, for one thing, or that I'm away from my family for five days a week, or all the driving I do every day, or the crack in my windshield, or trying to find/buy a house...

She had a whole new life ahead of her.  Things were falling into place.  But the health problems did not go away, the answers didn’t come, and Inqy died on July 7.

One last story.

Eric De La Cruz lived in Las Vegas, came from a loving family and had a good future.  What he didn’t have was health insurance.  At only 22, he was diagnosed with severe dilated cardiomyopathy, which is primarily a genetic condition – he didn’t ask for it, didn’t do anything to deserve it.  The remedy was as severe as it gets – a heart transplant at a relatively young age.  In addition to the intense preparation and the arduous nature of transplant surgery, it’s literally a life-changing experience.  Transplant recipients need to be on medication to suppress the immune system to prevent their bodies from rejecting the foreign organ.  The lifestyle changes are permanent and daunting.  And because heart transplants are still relatively infrequent – only around 2,000 per year -- the frustration and uncertainty for families is stressful beyond measure.  However, there is good news.  As explained on About.com, “Today, almost 90% of heart transplant recipients survive for at least one year after transplant, and up to 75% survive for five years.”

Because of his relative youth, Eric had excellent prospects, as daunting as his health challenges would be.  But what he didn’t have was health insurance through his employer, compounded by his being a student.  The small business he worked for simply couldn’t afford it.  So before he could fight for his life, he had to fight for the opportunity to fight for his life.

You can guess some of what followed – he could not buy insurance now because he had a pre-existing condition.  Even if he had miraculously found a plan that would take him, he would have been charged a prohibitively expensive premium based on health status.  By shedding his assets and giving up on working, he was able to qualify for Medicaid but, as we know all too well, Medicaid is a hybrid federal-state program.  Normally that wouldn’t make a difference – but there are no transplant centers in Nevada.  None.  In order to be covered for transplant surgery in  California, he needed to apply for Medicare coverage with his heart condition as a disability.  Medicare is a program designed to give wonderful care to seniors over 65.  It gives decent care for those with disabilities.  But a heart condition in need of a transplant meant that Eric didn’t get the care he needed.  Instead, he got more red tape than he could deal with as he was rejected for Medicare – twice.  He appealed one more time – the appeal took over a year to be heard, a year during which his heart function continued to deteriorate.

Eric’s family did what any of us would hope our family would do for us – they fought.  Hard.  Eric’s sister Veronica, a CNN reporter who had specialized as an Internet correspondent, following the latest stories in social media, took his story public and turned to Twitter for support.  You can still follow Eric’s Twitter Army using hashtags #Eric and #ETA, or at www.WeLoveEric.com and www.Tweet4Eric.com.  Unlike your average transplant patient, the De La Cruz family had harnessed the Internet, and people they had never met created petitions, web sites and grassroots communities to rally support.

He got his Medicare coverage after all, but the hospital refused to accept Medicare only – they needed supplemental insurance.  They wouldn’t admit him.  Despite the well-known fact that no hospital can turn someone away, Eric was a state away and could not be taken off IVs.  If the hospital didn’t send a transport for him, he could never get there.  So they began to raise the money, attracting the attention of singer Trent Reznor and popular rock band Nine Inch Nails.

Eric had tremendous advantages not available to most in this country.  He had a sister with connections who was willing to move heaven and earth to give her brother a new heart.  He had a community of strangers who loved, supported and raised money for him on Twitter and on the Web.  He had celebrities rally to his cause.  He raised nearly $900,000 in two weeks.  But it was all too late.  Eric passed away on the 4th of July.

What the hell does it say about the state of health care in America that all of that wasn’t enough to get him the care he needed to stay alive when he needed it?

If we had HR 3200 10 years ago, Eric would never have had to even look at Medicare or Medicaid.  He would have had quality health insurance, either public or private, either affordable (through a tax credit) for his small business employer to provide or affordable (through subsidies) for him to buy.  He would have had guaranteed benefits that would never have been taken away and his catastrophic care would have been covered.  Instead of raising a million dollars, he would have needed to raise 10% of his income for out-of-pocket expense.

If we had HR 3200 10 years ago, Inqy wouldn’t have had to worry about pinching pennies and worrying about how she would pay for car repairs or saving money for a house before seeing a doctor.  Her primary care doctor’s visit would have had no co-pay.  She would have had an insurance plan, public or private, that was affordable to her.

If we had single payer 30 years ago, neither one of them would have had to think of anything else except getting better.  But we didn’t – we decided an industry’s profit and the libertarian impulse of individualism was worth more than thousands of human lives.

Remember their stories the next time someone tries to tell you an eight month long legislative process is moving too fast.  Delay has consequences.

(Photo credit:  stimpy89 on Flickr.)