A Whimp and a Smirk
Usually I do not post on Thursday, but Wednesday night’s discussion on PBS’ NewsHour between Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va over George Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was a national embarassment. Emanuel kept referring to Cantor as his friend while Cantor kept dropping false statistics, misleading facts and flat-out distortions in-between smirks that would do George W. Bush proud. I kept wondering at what point was Emanuel going to turn to his “friend” and say “With all due respect, but this is nothing but sheer demogagery!”
Where was the anger, where was the outrage over this travesty? This is probably one of the most cynical and inhumane vetoes in a long time, made all the more so because the SCHIP bill was a carefully-crafted bipartisan effort. Quite frankly some of us are getting tired of Democrats like Emanuel acting as though such legislation is just another bill, just another political dispute, another fifteen minutes on the nightly news. It is time to end this infatuation with Republican Lite and take the gloves off. If you can’t do it for America’s children then quite frankly you are unfit to govern!
If the Republicans vote to sustain Bush’s veto, the consequences for millions of American families will be nothing short of catastrophic. In California, for example, the bipartisan bill would help the state achieve near-universal coverage for about 650,000 children. If the veto is sustained those children will be without coverage.
If you want to understand the consequences pay a visit to your local public hospital emergency room. Usually located in parts of town that the affluent do not regularly visit unless they have to, these places are often the last refuge of those who have already been through lives most of us cannot imagine. Some never leave except in a hearse.
If you come in like most patients, you enter through the ER, which is nothing like the television ERs with photogenic actors, fancy sets and soap opera scripts. The only similarity between reality and fantasy is that your first impression is of chaos. The real ER is truly a modern vision of Dante’s Hell, so that one half expects to see a large sign posted on the wall: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Except we might not see the sign through the tangle of people and medical equipment.
This is not to say that those who work in this place do not have hope, for often hope is all they have to offer, hope that is reflected in the eyes of all those patients which have that strange mixture of fear and uncertainty that comes only to those who know the string has played out and now they are about to come face to face with the great unknown.
A fair number of the patients also have a different look, one of anger and resignation after being kicked so many times that they are not sure what they will do the next time it happens and don’t really care. These patients hold sick babies who cry incessantly or sit there coughing with some malady that has gone on too long and now makes each painful hack sound like a death rattle. Others hold bandaged limbs or heads, many of them clotted dark red, some already showing the dreaded signs of infection. The cubicles around the ER often hold the hard cases who already have crossed over to that place where they have become a passive receptacle for enough tubes and wires to qualify them as cyborgs.
Amidst all these people sits a ticking time bomb far deadlier than the 9/11 attack, unnoticed by anyone for the threat she represents. On the outside she does not seem all that different from the others, perhaps even a little better dressed than most, outwardly appearing neither as ill or injured. But unknown to us, inside the body of the child she holds tightly who is strangely quiet, microbes so tiny they must be identified by an electron microscope are doing their mysterious, deadly work, multiplying at a furious pace, insinuating themselves into every organ as they cruise the veins and arteries without attracting the attention of any enforcement agent.
It may be the next AIDS, the next SARS, but whatever it is it will be something no current drug will stop. And our hopes and the hopes of all civilization that we will never have a repeat of the 1918 influenza epidemic ride on people who already have lost too much sleep and seen too much suffering and wonder if they can make it through the next hour. To catch those microbes, those treating this patient require the one thing besides money that is in short supply–time, time to assess that patient, time to ponder what they find, time to seek out other opinions, and time to do the right tests and get the right samples to the right technician in the right lab.
With the veto of SCHIP, some children will receive health care no better than they would in a third world backwater. We all know also how hard it is even for the middle class to afford expensive prescription drugs that might knock out a deadly infection. Meanwhile ER staff are overworked, underpaid and understaffed due to cuts that have driven many public inner city hospitals to the brink of bankruptcy. As for the research that might have identified the threat of this still unknown disease, it too has been the subject of GOP cuts.
Lack of education means the patients may have little of the knowledge they need to understand or communicate what ails them (translators are another group that has suffered cutbacks). Reductions in college loans mean fewer students can afford the long, costly road they must follow to become a physician or the even more expensive path to certification in a specialty. Public school cuts have affected areas such as wellness education while ideological rigidity over AIDS and sex education have weakened these programs.
So Representative Emanuel let us see a little righteous indignation, let us see you shove those smirks rights down your friend’s throat, because if he like the president truly believes in balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable in our society, if he opposes this out of some crackpot notion that this is socialized medicine than God help him for the darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who would pray on the the vulnerable and the defenseless.
Make not mistake about it, people are going to die to sustain President Bush’s veto. Enough people have died unnnecessarily in Iraq, but to purposely condemn our own children to death is an act that borders on the unspeakable, for this has nothing to do with budgets or policies or ideology and everything to do with that word the Republicans used to trumpet as if they owned it–values. Now the trumpets blow a requiem for those who will be lost.
Maybe they need to make this real. Imagine one of the most heart-ripping sights human eyes can behold–a tiny coffin holding a life snuffed out not by fate or by accident but by design. Look at the tiny face which will never have a chance to become a mother, a father, go to their high school prom, have children of their own, maybe even become a doctor or nurse and then make sure all America understands just who put that child in that coffin.
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