Month: March 2017

My mother died in 2010, two years and two months after she entered the hospital for emergency surgery in December 2008. She never would spend another night in her own bed. During that long odyssey, I shuttled back and forth between Baltimore and Jacksonville as she encountered a successive parade of complications that exacerbated her COPD. This resulted in Mom bouncing from hospital to rehabilitation center to nursing home and back again. My brother was on the ground to visit her every day and take care of her home. As the lawyer in the family, I dealt with admission agreements, several conversations about when or whether to withdraw life support and healthcare coverage. Or, rather what happens when healthcare coverage runs out.

Turns out, you can exhaust your lifetime of Medicare coverage before you die (at least you could back in 2010). That landed my mother in state-directed Medicaid land. In order to pay for my mother’s last three months of nursing care, she had to be indigent, which meant that the State of Florida took all of my mother’s (and late father’s) Social Security payments. She got to keep $35 a month. My brother and I took care of running her house.

My mother was a kind and loving and generous and bright and beautiful woman. Thanks to her and my father, my brother and I never wanted for much – new clothes every new school year, a Catholic education, trips to the beach and nearby Disney World (we were in Orlando, after all). But, she was afraid and anxious for most of her life. As a child of the Depression who grew up in a single-parent household, she was always afraid of not having enough money.   A bookkeeper and a cop, my parents never had much money – I doubt they ever made more than 40 grand. I vividly remember the look of fear on my mother’s face when, as a fourth grader, my father sat my brother and me down after mass one bright Sunday and told us that he had lost his job as a security officer and we would have to leave our Catholic school. We survived that chapter but my mother was always afraid of what could happen or might happen. In the end, she was afraid to die, too. She held on for months longer than I would have, had I been in her place.

I suppose that, had my mother not had Medicare and, later, Medicaid, I would have maxed out credit cards and taken on other debt to pay for her care. But, that would have only bought just a few months. Even with a good job with health insurance, I would not have been able to pay the cost of my mother’s long goodbye in a hospital bed at the rate of about $60,000 a month. Who could, really? According to our President and Republicans in Congress, however, that’s exactly what should happen. Or, as they might say, it sucks for you to be poor.

Earlier this week, social media featured a photo of a bunch of all white male members of Congress sitting around a conference table and discussing what healthcare coverage women could do without. Later in the week, as TrumpCare was imploding, it became clear that the so-called “Freedom Caucus” wing of the Republican Party would stand for no remains of the Affordable Care Act’s expanded coverage. Why? Well, if you ask Rep. Ted Yoho (R.-Fla.), who happens to represent the district where my mother lived and died, he had this to say on NPR: “I do not believe that the federal government role is to provide health care for the individual. I don’t look for anybody to pay for health care for me and my family (sic). That’s my responsibility.”

Talk about alternative facts. Mr. Yoho and his fellow members of Congress don’t pay for their healthcare. Like most of us who are lucky enough to have employer-provided health insurance, members of Congress pay hugely subsidized premiums for coverage that, in turn, pays for most of the astonishingly high costs of healthcare services, treatments, prescriptions and hospitalizations. And, Congress has some of the most subsidized healthcare insurance of all. If we all had to pay the actual amount on those explanations of benefits we receive from our insurance companies, a lot more of us would be in bankruptcy. Or dead.

And, that seems to be the goal. These privileged (straight, white, male) members of Congress, who move through life with a rank sense of entitlement, don’t want expanded healthcare for women and children and the poor. Especially poor women and children who are minorities. They don’t care because their narcissism allows them to believe that anyone who struggles with poverty or lack of health insurance deserves their fate. I guess Jesus wants them to die, early and unnecessarily. They also don’t care because, as men, it’s never been their concern. Privileged, straight, white men have it pretty good, despite all their ranting about the demise of real America. They’ve never had to worry about racism, bigotry, an unwanted pregnancy (including through sexual assault), or caring for sick children or sick parents while also trying to hold down a job where they make less than their male counterparts. These concerns are just made-up liberal noise to them.

I was very lucky to grow up in a house where my father shared the burden of financial and other struggles with my mother. But, all too often, it’s left to the women to figure it out. To work a miracle. To be in two places at the same time. To put their dreams on hold for someone else.

It’s time to come clean. You can dress it up with America and Freedom and Liberty all you want but opposition to expanded, affordable healthcare coverage is nothing more than the callous indifference of wealthy privileged Americans (both men and woman) who are just fine if their poorer fellow citizens suffer needlessly through the lack of health insurance. I believe that if more women were leading Congressional discussions on healthcare, we’d have a better shot at coming up with a plan that could address the philosophical objections of some while also maintaining a shred of basic humanity and common decency. Surely the minimum to be expected from such a great nation as the United States.

In the meantime, I’m just glad my mother isn’t alive today to be thrown out of a hospital bed by her member of Congress.

This is way more than 500 words, but I have a lot to say about anti-Semitism and its brethren.  Google “anti-Semitism” and you’ll learn that it first appeared in the late 19th Century as an attempt to re-brand Judenhass (i.e., hatred of Jews in German), presumably to recast such vulgar views in more politically scientific terms. In 1879, a German journalist who helped give anti-Semitism currency, Wilhelm Marr, wrote a pamphlet called “The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism,” in which he accused Jews of being liberals and a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation.

Nearly 140 years later, the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post featured a lead story of how the Netherlands’ far-right Freedom Party and its leader, Geert Wilders, could wind up the top vote-getter (that doesn’t mean he’d necessarily become Prime Minister) in this week’s national elections. Wilders, who was recently convicted of hate speech, wants to totally ban Muslims from living in Holland and routinely refers to Moroccans living in the country as scum. According to the Post, and despite Holland’s wealth, prosperity and humming economy, his message is resonating with the Dutch across all sectors of society; these are the same people who hid Anne Frank and her family while suffering greatly under the Nazis. Similar campaign strategies are playing well in France and Germany as we speak.

Two weeks ago, at a fintech conference on faster payments in Atlanta, I sat next to a London lawyer who tried to explain to me why so many people in England had voted for Brexit. He claimed that the open borders of the European Union had made it too easy for citizens from poorer member EU states to come to the United Kingdom and take good-paying jobs away from Her Majesty’s “native” subjects. Because immigrants were willing to work for less, the solicitor explained, all these maids from Poland had overrun the British hotel housekeeping business. Somehow, I had missed that the powerful British economy had been brought to its knees by an invasion of tidy Polish women.

Much like our own Trump-up, there are striking parallels in each of these alarming narratives. A common yet dangerously potent message underlies all nationalistic playbooks, whether from today or 1879. Voters are ramped up beyond any connection to fact or reality with the dangerous rhetoric of “us first,” which is to say that native, majority, white Christian people are under attack from within their own borders by minorities who look different or pray differently or speak differently. Everyone who is different is an enemy or a potential enemy. Whether at a Trump rally in Florida or in a village in Yorkshire or on the streets of Amsterdam, this populist message is frustratingly and frighteningly (to me) effective at stoking our fears against each other.

But, I still don’t get why? First and most importantly, I don’t think it works – at least in terms of improving the lives of those who buy into this bigotry.  Now, I suppose one could point to China as a repressive, nationalist society that works, but I assume most of us in the United States still think a free market economy is the way to go.  Assuming that, the numbers never add up. I’ve worked in Washington for nearly 20 years and I can say that no native-born American has ever been let go from cleaning the offices in which I work. Where are all these “real Americans” being forced out of long hours, low pay and physically demanding labor? They don’t exist is the answer.  Perhaps people are looking for any assurances to the fears that plague them.  And, logic and fact seem to play no part. Case in point, a hell of a lot of the estimated 24 million Americans who stand to lose health insurance if and when the Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act voted for that very thing when they cast their ballot for this President.  Their sole reason for wanting to repeal Obamacare seems to be, drum roll, their hatred of the nation’s first black President.

Could the appeal lie in its tribalism? Surely, that must play a part; we are naturally drawn to people who are like us in some way.  Still, the fact that I love visiting Ireland and happily recall the first time I walked the streets of the Castro in San Francisco doesn’t mean my existence is threatened by standing next to a woman in a hijab on the Metro. Economic insecurity? Of course, I get that fear of one’s own future can make more tantalizing the appeal of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, nativism and any other strain of racism.

Even so, and quite apart from the fact that these campaigns are morally reprehensible, history shows pretty definitively that a movement built on racial superiority (in whatever form) is doomed to fail. Every time. So, why does this demagoguery continue to work?

The answer must lie with the politicians and their quest for naked power and wealth.  These “leaders” and their advisors stand to gain much – politically and financially – through hate-filled campaigns while the voters stand to lose much (more).  It’s patently obvious that this Republican administration doesn’t care about the economic struggles of Americans any more than Geert Wilders or Marine LePen are looking out for struggling Dutch and French families, respectively. Rather, these politicians see nationalism, in all its anti-Semitic, xenophobic, racist glory, as their path to unchecked power and a financial windfall. In consolidating power while demonizing everyone who is different, these strong-men and -women want to silence any discord or protest, raking in the dough and deluding their followers into believing that only they, these would-be dictators, can save the “true” people from the infidels among them.

In the end, many will suffer as a result of the hatred and prejudice brought by these campaigns while their supporters will only end up broke. Not to mention morally bankrupt.

History does bear repeating.  This is a lose-lose proposition if ever there was.