Laughing at Healthcare Climate Change Denial

Today, we are joining over 7,700 blogs addressing climate change as part of Blog Action Day 2009. Now, I could go straight to addressing green practices in healthcare. But that would be too obvious. Instead, let’s focus on grassroots (hey, grass is green.) Besides being at the top of Obama’s agenda, what climate change and healthcare reform have in common is that grassroots movements got them – and keep them – in the public eye. They can be convenient punching bags, yes, but they are unable to be ignored.

It’s easy to dismiss the subtle signs of climate change until you’ve been hit by a typhoon, seen your crops die from drought, or witnessed polar bears drown as the ice melts beneath them. Similarly, it’s easy to deny the healthcare crisis until you’ve been dropped by your insurer and are unable to buy coverage. Or maybe you’ve been maimed and bankrupted by our over-priced, Swiss cheese, variable quality system-less healthcare mess. The good news is that the public is warming (pun intended) to reform. For healthcare, we can call that positive healthcare reform climate change.

But as our over 47,000 Change.org Healthcare members know, the media is in denial. Thanks to Change.org member Martin Bring for bringing a fun Daily Show clip to my attention addressing just that (caution: bleeps ahead.) When a spoof news show offers the best coverage of healthcare reform issues, while CNN continually has to “Leave it there” when news threatens to become balanced, we have a problem. Apparently it has Tea Party blinders on.

We expect numbers magic, theatrical lies, and perhaps Saturday Night Live fact-checking from FOX, but CNN? Perhaps it should rename itself CMN (Corporate Mouthpiece News), because word on the street is that the majority of the population wants not just reform, but a public option (thank you AHIP for nudging more people in the right direction this week.) In fact, half of Senate Democrats were willing to put their own John Hancocks to paper demanding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid include a public option in the final Senate bill. So much for climate change denial. Perhaps it’s time the mainstream media took notice of such man-on-the-street goings-on instead of yet another private insurer "premium inflation" pseudo-report.

Now, what about recycling, that bastion of environmentalists everywhere? A good idea, yes? Well, not always. In US healthcare recycling is sometimes ill-advised. For instance, nurses reusing catheter tubing and saline bags during cardiac stress tests: really bad idea. A nurse at Broward County Medical Center in Florida has been doing just that since 2004, involving potentially 1,851 patients who now need to be tested for blood-borne diseases. In Las Vegas, a clinic that routinely reused syringes potentially infected 40,000 patients over 2 years. That’s a lot of patients.

As scary as that is, it pales in comparison to the patients affected by failed healthcare policy recycling. Our Congressional representatives continue to suggest dividing up the population as an answer for healthcare reform. Yet private insurers know there’s strength in numbers, which is why they are continually merging with and acquiring competitors. It’s time to use grassroots strength to band together and wield the consumer power of every policyholder and taxpayer who is paying for our sub-par healthcare. This means recycling the massively scaled strategies that work in other industrialized countries, instead of continuing our grand experiment in what doesn’t work.

Going green in healthcare policy means first recognizing warming trends in public perception and then getting the media to spread the news. Isn’t that allegedly their core competency? Ours, apparently, is goading them. Keep up the good fight – so the grass we grow on the other side really is greener.