Why We Needed Healthcare Reform Now

After a long, drawn out battle complete with racist, hate-filled diatribes courtesy of the Tea Party protestors and a Republican opposition that brought nothing to the table except a warped desire to block every initiative of the Obama presidency, I was overjoyed when our chief executive signed the healthcare bill this week. For the first time in months, Democrats seized the initiative and delivered on one of the President's campaign platforms.

The system is broken, plain and simple. Our unregulated, for-profit health insurance companies have become the scourge of the middle class and working poor. Unlike many of my friends and some family members, I believe that affordable healthcare in one of the wealthiest nations on earth is an inalienable right, not a privilege. According to the Health Affairs website, 52 million Americans will at some point be without insurance in 2010. That's one in every six Americans, and it's absolutely shameful.

Thankfully, the entire healthcare bill is available online at opencongress.org. In numerous debates I have had with conservative friends and foes in the last week, the vast majority of them are relying on information from Fox News or the usual right wing scare tactic of e-mail chains filled with lies and outrageous claims. I can rebut ninety percent of their falsehoods with specific sections in the bill (healthcare for illegal immigrants, IRS access to our bank accounts, health care rationing, ad nauseum), yet they only believe what Glenn Beck told them about "the socialization of medicine in this country" and refuse to use their reading skills to separate fact from fiction. It's not only maddening, but also a sad indictment about the paranoid inroads that these so-called pundits have made on the American psyche.

It reminds me of the Jack Nicholson outburst from "A Few Good Men."

"You want to know the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

I understand that people are scared of this legislation. Not only is it a significant change to the current healthcare system but it also contains some ambiguity regarding cost reductions in the Medicare budget. I think it's also realistic to question whether the nonpartisan, Congressional Budget Office's assurance that the legislation will reduce the deficit by 138 million dollars over the next ten years and 1.2 trillion dollars in the following decade is accurate. It's not a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a start.

Regardless of whether the number of Americans who die each year because of their lack of access to affordable healthcare is 40,000 or 25,000, we must accept the fact that is an atrocious legacy of our system. All of the right wing's incessant lies about government run "death panels" have in fact been a sanctioned corporate parade of death for years. Shareholders profit when the insurance company drops a sick newborn or cancer patient from their rolls, and the consumer or their family member pays that price, sometimes with their life.

Hello Spring...

It’s been a long winter for my family here in northern Indiana. We had snow on the ground for nearly eight consecutive weeks and it seemed like we would never see a day where the mercury hit fifty degrees. It wasn't a particularly hard winter. My kids only missed a half day of school due to the weather, and that was due to a fog delay of all things. No major snow storms, just four or five inches here and there, a seemingly never ending reload whenever the earth threatened to melt the white stuff away.

Well, it finally happened two weeks ago. Several consecutive days of fifty degree weather finally allowed us to see grass in our yard. Even the black squirrels were happy. Instead of hanging out up in the trees or digging through last year’s flower boxes on our deck, the squirrels have been darting around the property checking for hidden stashes of walnuts. The birds seem happy as well. Cardinals and even a Red-Wing Blackbird have been making touch and go landings in the backyard, ever vigilant of the Cooper’s Hawk that has taken up residence in our cul-de-sac.

Both of my kids have abandoned their video games, computers and the television, instead spending their time outdoors playing with friends or sharpening their baseball and softball skills. They haven’t broken any windows yet (which seems to be a spring ritual), so we go about our chores in nervous anticipation of that first hard sound of shattered glass. Between playing family games of “horse” in the driveway and cleaning up the collateral damage of broken limbs in the yard, we have rediscovered the joy of being unburdened by coats and mittens.

Even our neighbors appear to be on a “spring high.” The dog walkers have an exaggerated bounce to their step and contented smiles on their faces. The kids are getting fewer after-school phone calls and more knocks on the door inviting them to jump on a neighbor’s trampoline, play hopscotch or shoot hoops. People are out working in their yards, pausing from their tasks when we drive by, and shouting greetings that I haven’t heard in six months.

I’m not quite ready to dust off my golf clubs or get the bikes down from the racks in the garage, but it won’t be long. Summer is a marvelous season, but spring is the time when we shake off our chilly exteriors and embrace civilization again.