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.
