“The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs," read an organizational statement to the Senate Finance Committee. "The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans." --Huffington Post
Dear A.M.A.,
The mere 30 percent of uninsured individuals you are so wildly unconcerned about amounts, at present, to 98 million people. Ninety-eight million people. Put it another way; Almost one out of every three Americans has no health insurance. No reasonable expectation that they can have preventive care, no reasonable expectation that it they slip on the ice and break an ankle, they won’t shortly become bankrupt or homeless or both.
Please explain to me how you can claim to be healers, when the only thing you really are is heels. Please explain to me how you can claim to be humanitarians when you care so little about your fellow humans that you block efforts by their government to help them. Please explain to you how this corresponds in any way to the oath you took to “First, do no harm.” Harm, in case you were a little light on your humanities courses in college and therefore know only two things, the science of medicine and accounting--can be either active or passive harm. While few of you would purposely harm a patient--whacking off the left foot when the right foot is infected, for example (and it has happened)--keeping 98 million Americans disenfranchised from even rudimentary health care certainly comes under the heading of doing harm. Great harm. To those individuals and to the society that so totally fails them, primarily because of your greed.
Mind you, I avoid A.M.A. members--even now that I have insurance after 30 years without--like the plague. Because plague is what you are. A plague of locusts eating U.S. economic health.
Homeopaths are much more reasonable, and just as effective. I found homeopathy in those lean and uninsured years, realized I was getting well without being made sick, and cheaply. Enough homeopathic remedy to cure a bona fide strep throat costs about $6.95. That’s six dollars and ninety five cents. The last time I got a prescription for Zithromax for the same purpose, it cost $79.00. That’s seventy-nine dollars for five tiny pills. And I paid for it myself; my homeopath was out of town, and I had to presume upon my friendship with a doctor’s wife to get some medicine. At least I didn’t also have the office visit fee. I’ll take the phone call to the homeopath, a yearly $100 checkup fee and $6.95 for little pills that work great any day.
But this is not a letter in favor of homeopathy. While I am not likely to be a big user of A.M.A.-style medicine, I realize that most Americans do not value homeopathy and naturopathy and chiropractic and Ayurvedic medicine as I do, but they, too, need health care.And they go to A.M.A. doctors, possibly because they have been convinced that the A.M.A. is their only option.
Still, they need health care they will use and can use, and they need it without begging at “free clinics” with rules to get in as long as the average medical school application.
They need it without the specter of bankruptcy hanging over them if their deductible exceeds their ability to pay, a likely scenario if the ill person happens to be the breadwinner in a household, or a single person struggling alone.
Frankly, dear A.M.A., I don’t really care that you spent long years in expensive schools learning your trade, and the way you do it, trade is precisely what it is. It is not a profession; professionals?even advertising agencies for crying out loud?do pro bono work. I know of exactly one doctor who does anything of the sort, and he’s an orthodontist who goes once a year to South America to help dentally challenged children in the Andes who would otherwise be ostracized by their communities. He charges pretty well for his services at home. I know; a few years ago, I wanted perfect teeth and endured the pain and the expense. But at least, he does the Andes thing on his own dime…or mine. Doesn’t matter to me; I could afford his care, and I was happy that some small part of my fees helped someone else.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of us who have been lucky medically and financially would not mind if part of our fees helped others in need. My luck has been extraordinary; at exactly the time I got tossed off my horse, knocked out cold and carted to the emergency room for a CAT scan, I happened to be working for a publishing company that provided health insurance, instead of freelancing. Other times, when I wasn’t covered, I wasn’t badly hurt. Except when I dislocated two fingers five years ago. They are still not right, but I couldn’t afford to have them seen to at the time. Homeopathy helped the pain and swelling, but I think tendons were ripped and should have been stitched or something.
But I am not the usual patient, and I know it. I have been very lucky; two wonky fingers is not much trouble after a life mainly without health insurance and messing around with horses. I suffer and grieve for those who have no access to alternative treatment, no friends who are doctors and dentists (during the lean years, another friend’s husband, a dentist, charged me about half his going rate because I had taught his wife and daughter to ride, and he’s a nice man), and are reduced to begging or going without. I had a friend whose front teeth were knocked out when he protected his younger brother from a bully; he was a young actor at the time, and needless to say, his career was sent spinning downward. He was toothless for a couple of years.
Another friend, a lovely riding instructor, spent more than ten years with the worst looking mouth you can imagine--how she even opened it, I cannot contemplate--because she had been injured teaching riding and it took her that long to save up the money for the extractions and dentures. Ten years with broken and missing teeth, because her work skills were in an industry fraught with danger and totally lacking in the basic perks, like health insurance.
Worst of all, a dear friend, a minister at a small church, died last December of a congenital heart problem. He was 47. He had had health insurance, but gave it up because his partner had big child-support bills, and he needed that extra money in his paycheck. Had he been able to have yearly checkups, they might have found the “Swiss cheese” that was developing in his aorta in time to fix it. As it was, his emergency room visit when his partner adjudged there was no choice--the man was in so much pain--resulted in admittedly heroic measures from surgeons at a great Baltimore hospital who worked on him for nine hours…only to lose him because the disorder had so far progressed that the patches wouldn’t hold and he died in recovery. There will be no bill; the hospital--unique in my experience--offers free services under some conditions to those who cannot pay. Even though I am insured now, that’s where I’d want to go. My friend's doctors are among the few medical heroes around, even though, despite their lengthy, dedicated and brilliant work, they couldn’t save him. It was not they who were to blame; it is the American health care system that put the doctors and my friend into such a position.
This is needless, and it is all your fault, dear A.M.A. and that of assorted dunderheads who very wrongly fear “socialized medicine.” Is it, in fact, ethical to stand in the way of Universal Health Care when what it would mean, basically, is that some patients might have to wait a while to have a benign wart removed, because people with disintegrating aortas needed help first? In England, many people buy a supplemental policy, if they choose and can afford it, which does provide semi-private doctors in case they want that wart gone NOW. My late British in-laws had it; they were both well cared for in their final illnesses. But those who don’t have it are still cared for in England...perhaps not with all the bells and whistles, but with dignity.
Is that, in the end, too much to ask? Is it ethical that you, the A.M.A., whose members vow to “First, do no harm,” should stand in the way of human health and, perhaps more tellingly, human dignity?
Is there any reason whatsoever that the rest of us?those 98 million uninsured Americans and however many of the rest of us have a conscience and some empathy and at least a buck or two left over at the end of the month….
Is there any reason we cannot amongst us mount a sufficiently bankrolled media campaign to leave A.M.A. obstructionism in the dust? It would be better, dear A.M.A., if you spent your anti-healthcare war chest on providing health care, and better, too, if the rest of us didn’t have to spend what might be health dollars campaigning to wrest our health care from those sworn to provide it who are refusing to do so and holding us all hostage in the meantime.
Sincerely,
Laura Harrison McBride
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