Margaret Randall
This
week’s mail brought a letter quite suddenly and unceremoniously informing me
that my health insurance provider is discontinuing my group policy. "Your
existing QualMed health care coverage will end on October 31, 2000. . . this is
the only notice you will receive" is the way the company’s account
representatives put it. I am one year and three months away from 65, the age I
will be eligible for Medicare (if Medicare still exists). And if HMOs still have
senior plans by then, I may be able to draw on some combination of government
and private coverage. Last year I earned $11,000. My partner is our
household’s main provider, but I cannot be on her health plan because she is a
teacher and the Public School System for which she works does not recognize
domestic partners as families. For the past good many years we have been
spending an additional two to three hundred dollars a month on my individual
coverage. Now this cost will no longer be an option.
I
am one of the lucky ones. The same mail that delivered the above letter brought
another telling me that longtime peace and justice activist Marv Davidov is
currently fighting prostate cancer, diabetes, and a broken ankle. The letter
asks for donations to help a man older than I am and with neither health
insurance, a 401(k) plan, stocks and bonds or even a guaranteed job. I put what
I could in the enclosed envelope, hope many others will be moved to do the same,
and made a mental note to call my old friend.
Still,
I am not representative of the millions of U.S. Americans currently living below
the poverty line, without health insurance, often even without adequate shelter
and food. When compared with these citizens of the richest nation on earth, I
have little about which to complain. Yet I am complaining. I am furious. A
cursory look at either presidential candidate’s campaign promises in the area
of health care and prescription drug accessibility shows cheap promises of
"caring and commitment." Never mind that neither major party has
placed our nation’s health high enough on its political agenda to insure the
coverage enjoyed by citizens of all other industrialized countries and some
countries that have nowhere near our level of industrialization. Attention to
people’s health, education, and other basic needs is forever subordinate to
maintaining the U.S. death machine.
Those
in power—whether they be our elected officials, the CEO’s of tobacco
companies, manufacturers of automobile tires or insurance industry
magnates—continue to seduce our support and then, when we need them, tell us
they just can’t afford to help or that they want to "apologize to the
American people" or say sorry: the coverage you’ve paid into all these
years will end on such and such a date. Quite in spite of whom we vote into
office, it is clear that corporate interests rule our lives. Further,
increasingly sophisticated handling techniques are aimed at giving us the sense
that our disempowerment is our fault. Any reassignment of priorities is our
responsibility.
The
ever widening gap between those in power and those whose needs are not being
met, the rhetoric that describes promises never intended to be kept, and the
subtle and not so subtle shifting of blame from those in power to the victims of
such a system, is creating a culture of rage whose effects upon our way of life
are impossible to compute. But we can make some predictions. If we continue to
spend more on prisons and the military than on people’s health and education,
if corporate CEOs continue to draw six figure salaries while one fourth of our
country’s children live in poverty, if more and more U.S. Americans swell the
ranks of the homeless, the downsized, the throw-away elderly and those without
healthcare, we cannot be surprised by the social rage that is everyday more
evident.
Road
rage. Telephone rage. Massive depression and despair. A sense of
disenfranchizement that forces people who care, in one election after another to
swallow hard and cast their vote for whomever they presume to be the least
damaging of the available "choices." This rage has been palpable for
years in poor minority communities, inner city ghettos, on Indian reservations
and in areas of rural poverty. The only change is that it has now invaded middle
America: white middle-class suburbia. We are no longer surprised or even shocked
by the teenager who goes on a killing spree or the presidential candidate who
lies about his opponent’s and/or his own record and intentions. Still saddened
but not shocked.
An
impotent rage courses through the nation’s veins, all its veins. Whether or
not we as a people have a future with any degree of dignity and peace depends
upon our collective ability to channel that rage into constructive action.
Through lesson after painful lesson we are learning that this constructive
action will not work if it is within the framework of electoral politics as we
know it.