I’m writing on the eve of an important ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in a week that has seen a few of them. Although, what did we expect this week, with Uranus and Pluto squaring off precisely for the first time and a pseudo-Mercury retrograde ending (Venus in Gemini)? Thursday’s big announcement is about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the one introduced by President Obama in 2010. You know the one, but you may only know it by its derisive nickname, coined by the far Right and repeated by nearly everyone. Talk about successful brainwashing.
I’m not an expert on all this plan entails. A few years ago, when I worked for a statewide citizen action non-profit, one of our primary goals was a universal single-payer health care system at the state level. Back then, I was always abreast of local, state and national health care issues. We were going to be the first state to get something meaningful on the books – and for a while we thought we had made a real step in that direction.
But I digress. My point was simply that now that I’m not so actively part of the fight, I find tracking health care reform –which, let’s face it, amounts to health insurance reform — to be even more confusing and frustrating than before. Part of that is, I think, due to the tremendous emphasis on the insurance industry to the detriment of both health and care.
I don’t think even the insurance industry was always this way, let alone medicine. Then again, maybe I’ve simply been lucky enough to encounter a few individuals who ‘get it’. When I was working for that non-profit, doing fund-raising calls, I had the pleasure of speaking to a man who said his grandfather had been the first president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine (which was swallowed by Anthem years ago). He said his grandmother used to be angry with her husband, because he refused every raise and bonus that was offered – believing instead that the money should go back into the program. When he retired, the new president automatically received double the salary. It was all downhill from there.
My father was a doctor for nearly 40 years, from the time he finished med school until about a month before his death three years ago this past Sunday. He was an osteopath – a DO – and worked for himself in a small, rural private practice that entire time. I get the impression that once upon a time, there used to be a lot more doctors like him – though that might be its own fairy tale. Certainly his was not a common breed in the last third of his practice; I sometimes wonder if there are any left now at all.