Sarah Burke: A death that demands we do SOMETHING about universal healthcare

Engraving of an imagined druid's grove. Both yew and oak were sacred to druids, as was the whole earth and everything on it. (Wiki commons)

Some days, you just have to go with the flow.

Today was supposed to be about getting ready for a short, important trip. And about walking the dog since she’ll be caged for a few days. And about promoting my novel (shameless promotion: humorous mystery, Crash Course by Nicky McBride, on Kindle).

But it’s not. It’s about the real needs of people and how those needs have been crushed under the heels of the fearless hunters among us, the recipients of DNA that offers brawn without brain, humanity without compassion and ignorance without respite. In short, the modern corporation man. (NOTE: I will use the masculine pronoun, not because I’m anti-feminist, but because casting females in a role the feminine principle does not support is ludicrous.)

This rumination was occasioned by an article a friend posted on Facebook. The article notes that Canadian half-pipe skier Sarah Burke died in a hospital in the US, meaning her parents are socked with a bill for a couple hundred grand. Had she died in Canada―had an AMERICAN skier died in Canada, in fact―there would have been no such bill. In Canada, as in most of developed nations, people are not denied healthcare, nor are they bankrupted when an unavoidable situation develops in which they are given health care whether they want it or not.

Out cold, but not out in the cold. Whew!

About 20 years ago, I was tossed off a horse, knocked out cold, and concussed. I awoke briefly a couple of times; during one lucid interlude, the barn staff told me they had called the ambulance. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’d rather just go home.” Sure. Wouldn’t anyone who had no recollection of what had happened and saw little but a sort of swimmy green jacket? But, though I actually had health insurance at the time because I actually worked for someone else (a rarity), I was so used to NOT availing myself of any sort of medicine that the first thing in my mind when I was just barely conscious (and not for long) was, “NO, please don’t call the medics. I can’t afford it.” I next awoke in the hospital with a friend standing next to me. And then I was out again, thankfully until after the CAT scan. She, a graphic artist, asked to watch it; she told me later I did have a brain. Nice.

Anyway, my little story is as nothing compared to what so many have faced. And further, my little dance with healthcare that time cost me about $600, as had the first of the two incidents I’ve ever had. And both times, I was totally responsible; it wasn’t an illness or disease or disorder. It was my choice to ride crazy horses. And I was damn lucky.

Maybe it is because of that luck that I feel so firmly that it is unconscionable for any society to bankrupt those whose encounters with the healthcare industry are unavoidable, if indeed they get the care in the first place. It might be said that Sarah Burke’s injury was self-inflicted, as was mine. She was engaged, by choice, in a dangerous sport. As was I. As I said, I was damn lucky.

Life is dangerous; So what?

But what of that? Should we never get any exercise, never push the envelope of what humans can do? It is bad enough that you can’t get coverage if you tick the box for riding motorcycles, flying a plane and assorted other things the tunnel-visioned actuaries think are dangerous. I was just lucky there, too; they haven’t figured out yet that riding horses over fences is a dangerous sport.  I just happened, during brief interludes of employment, to be covered by health insurance when a problem arose. But if I could have afforded insurance when I was freelance, I wouldn’t have been denied since equine sports have gotten a pass from the dodos at Theft Coverage USA.

What’s a society to do? Whatever it takes. And that does not include preventing talented people in sports or any human pursuit from fulfilling their life’s work or passion.

Each of the ancient Celtic tribes supported their healers in toto. They also supported their spiritual leaders. And they supported their poets, the keepers of their history and mores, the creators of beauty in words and often music, and sometimes other forms of art. Healers―druids or shamans, if you like―had no other task but to be available to heal members of the tribe. Spiritual guides, ovates, had no other task but to help members of the tribe in their relationship with the earth mother, each other, themselves. Bards―poets, musicians, historians, artists―had no other task but to create beauty and convey from one generation to the next the truth of the tribe.

In no case does America honor its druids, ovates and bards. Oh, sure. Some doctors get amazingly wealthy; is that honoring them? No. It is paying them out of individual pockets for tightly controlled use of their special skills.

Millionaire clergy; contradiction in terms

Some religious leaders become millionaires; is it because their pastoral care is available to all of their tribe―or to visitors―who ask? No, it is because they have developed a firm grasp of fund-raising, television, or both.

And some artists become quite wealthy. Look at J.K. Rowling. Look at Angelina Jolie. Look at the late Michael Jackson. Is it because they offer their gift willingly to the tribe that supports them? No. Not at all. In the case of Rowling (one of my favorite rants as some will know), she borrowed from other tribes’ work, and when she got rich, she set about using the courts to ensure others could not profit from any work even passingly similar to her own derivative one. Bona fide bards help other bards to develop, to learn from them the skills and information needed to become good bards, who will in due course be supported by their tribe.

Angelina Jolie finds adoption to be a nice path to fame and fortune, piggybacking her possible acting gift (a druidic calling and worthwhile to society) on her self-promotion gift (a corporate, hunter sort of thing to do. I expect we should just be happy a few children find a home as a collateral benefit.) 

And Michael Jackson, who had a true gift, was so lumbered with the insanities of his family and the lust of his fans that there was no chance he could express his gift for the asking in peace during a long life. As a bard should do.

The Druid model is all we need

It is all skewed. It is skewed in the ways that the powerful hunters think best. It is skewed in the ways that will enable the powerful hunters to choose who the druids, bards and ovates will be, and who in the tribe has access to their gifts, and even which of their gifts will be deemed acceptable by the hunters.

Time to give it up.

In homeopathy, the easiest part of the body to heal will experience recovery first, followed by the deeper tissues, and finally proceeding to the spirit level―to the constitution―and correcting its anomalies. So I think it is right to tackle health care first. For all the misery its lack causes, that lack is not a malady in itself but rather an expression of deeper maladies in the body politic. So, if we correct access to medical care, then next we will begin to truly see what is the matter with our spiritual leadership and take it out of the hands of martinets and oligarchs and return it to the gentle spiritual healers of old who actually cared for their tribe. And once that is on its way to health, maybe we will begin to support the bards―the poets, artists, musicians―who fill our newly opened souls with joy and who chronicle the way we are for the delight and education of generations yet to come.

It’s a nice dream―I try to live in it at least once a day―and it’s one I’m hoping will come true.

Obscene health insurance profits ready to harvest

Sick People Praying for Recovery by Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1300-1366)

Photo by Doruk Salancı. Wiki Commons.

When I was a child, if we went to the doctor for a sore throat or measles, my mother wrote a check. It was for ten dollars. Granted, that was the 1950s and early 1960s, but even in the late 60s, I recall going to my mother’s doctor for a sore throat when I was home from college. The charge had gone all the way up to $20. It sounds like peanuts although it was a bit more like real money then. But it wasn’t ridiculous real money. Last time I went to a doctor….oh, wait….there virtually is no last time. In the 1970s, when health care costs began to get out of hand, I discovered homeopathy. And I have used it, almost exclusively, ever since.

I am not going to get into a debate about whether it works or doesn’t. For me, it works. Best of all, it is cheap. Every year, once a year, I would spend $150 to see my homeopath. He would assess my health, provide remedies as needed, and I’d go away…never to need a doctor for another whole year. If I did get some little bothersome thing in the interim, he would send me the remedy. I travelled some distance to see the late Dr. T.C. Cherien, a doctor like no other, a doctor who comes along once in each person’s lifetime and against whom all others are measured.

Zithromax, miracle for $100 bucks
So, having not found a replacement, I have on occasion had to depend on an AMA doctor friend of mine who would see me for nothing  and prescribe a remedy for a strep throat, zithromax, a well-tolerated antibiotic that even my basically allergic systems tolerate. And it only costs about $100 a pop. For five little pills.

I have no idea what my doctor friend charges for a visit, but it can’t be cheap. I can guarantee that it’s more than the current equivalent of $10 or $20, the office visit charge in the days before insurers figured out they could really rape us by including incidentals and not just the major medical events that were the intention of insurance in the 50s and 60s.

Of course, most people who work at good jobs in major corporations are covered by insurance. As a freelancer for nine-tenths of my career, I couldn’t afford health insurance on the open market. But because I ate well, exercised (albeit on horseback, over fences, from which I had a couple of emergency room visits), saw a chiropractor and a homeopath―and had another friend who is a dentist and adjusts the bill to suit my current income to a point―I have never been in the dire straits most Americans who work for themselves or work at low-paying jobs are in.

USA: Third world health care and longevity

And we are in dire straits. Writing in the New York Times on Oct. 5, David Leonhardt noted:

We don’t live as long as people in Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe or even relatively poor Jordan. Misdiagnosis is common. Medical errors occur more often than in some other countries. Unique to the developed world, millions of people have no health insurance, and millions more, like many fast-food workers, are underinsured.

This was in response to McDonald’s and its expensive, virtually useless hourly worker health insurance, and the fact that Mr. Obama’s national insurance reforms may exempt such plans.

It’s better than nothing, some claim.

No it’s not, claim others.

Here’s the real problem; it is national INSURANCE, not national health care.

Until the United States―mainly, but not limited to, the GOP, the Teabaggers, the cranially challenged fundamentalist capitalists and others―understands that inserting the profit motive into health care is unethical, immoral, and inhumane as well as unworkable, nothing will change. It is unworkable, that is, in every respect except one: obscene profits created on the suffering of millions.

Let me repeat that: The health insurance industry in the United States creates its obscene profits on the suffering of millions.

That may be capitalism, but it is also spiritually bankrupt in every sense of the word. It is especially bankrupt in a nation that claims so vociferously to follow the teachings of Christ, who said that whatever one does to the least among us, we do to Him.

I’m not a Christian, but I do believe Jesus of Nazareth was a prime example of existential goodness, goodness because right is preferred over injustice, because order is preferred over chaos, which leads only to destruction.

America has planted the seeds of its own destruction in so many fields. In the field called Health Care, the plants have withered and may not be able to be revived.

On the other hand, in the field marked Thoughtless Cruelty in Support of Obscene Riches, the bumper crop is harvested daily, only to disappear into a great maw of even more obscene conspicuous consumption, adding insult to exceedingly grave injury.