My Uncle Nunzi recently had to make a trip to the ER of a major hospital in this city. (Hint: It’s the one named after Sally Hemmings’ favorite American president.) The chairs in the ER are made of hard wood with no cushions — perfectly designed for the couple hours’ wait until someone finally does a blood-pressure check on you.
In the interest of privacy, I won’t go into the details of Uncle’s illness, but rest easy — he survived the experience. He was in some pain, and was dismissed from the ER at 4 a.m. with his pain still intact and a couple of prescriptions in hand. It’s medicine American style, the kind of which we like to brag is the "best in the world."
While there, Uncle ran into a couple of 30-somethings who had no medical coverage at all. Their employers offer them no coverage through their jobs and they can’t afford medical insurance on their own. It’s the way the richest and most powerful nation on earth does things when it comes to its citizens and medical insurance.
The ER on that night was filled with the working poor, who routinely use the ERs of our major hospitals for their treatment because the hospitals can’t turn them away. As Uncle found out, it’s a very expensive way of treating people with no coverage.
At the same time, there are lots of people without medical coverage who never make it to the ER at all. It’s life in America where every time decent medical insurance becomes a campaign issue, the Republicans holler "socialized medicine."
At one time, Uncle believed the myth that this Republican president, compassionate conservative that he is, would be different. And to hear the president brag about his plan to cover more of the uninsured, you’d almost believe him, except Uncle Nunzi just found out that the Bush plan would not only still leave many folks without medical coverage, he would spend less money than his father proposed to spend on healthcare in 1992.
The Kerry plan is too expensive, says the president, who on reflex always favors cutting taxes on the wealthy. Why, Kerry would have the government run the plan, Bush outright fibbed during the first two debates.
First off, the Kerry plan would be employer-based, not "run by the government," and the president knows it. Secondly, this is a president who doesn’t flinch at government intrusion into the most private areas of our lives.
I have to tell you that every time Bush smirked and winked during the debates, I had to take one of Uncle’s blood-pressure pills.
The president likes to chide Kerry because he — Bush — has been able to get a prescription-drug benefit passed and Kerry was absent for the vote. Uncle found out there was more than met the eye here, too. There are large gaps in the coverage, but the big drug companies pretty much get free rein to charge whatever they wish because the Republicans decided to prohibit the government from negotiating better prices.
And meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration has "protected" us from cheaper drugs being obtained from Canada. Uncle never realized that the Canadian people were using "unsafe" drugs, but then he never knew that Canada was just a third-world country with good hockey players.
Once Uncle uncovered the myth about us being the best cared-for people on earth, he started uncovering other myths about the president. Like the fact that Bush is the consistent one out of the two candidates on Iraq. Uncle supported the war because he believed Bush when he said he was making us safe from another 9/11 and from WMD or nuclear attacks, only to find out that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, didn’t have any WMD and sure as hell didn’t have a nuclear program like North Korea or Iran.
Now Uncle is having a tough time swallowing the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes based on what a dictator would like to do. Uncle admits that he would like to have one shot at Sophia Loren before he dies, but Uncle doesn’t believe Sophia’s boyfriend will be launching a preemptive strike against him solely on that basis.
The final straw for Uncle may have been when Bush played the religion card against stem-cell research. Uncle is at the age when he figures if it’s between his not getting Parkinson’s disease and a frozen embryo in a petri dish that is likely to be destroyed, guess which one he’s choosing?
You know what really ticked off Uncle, but he won’t admit it? Just when he thought this election was about faith vs. cynicism, he found out from a leading newsmagazine that Bush doesn’t go to church services on Sunday, but Kerry does.
Maybe this election is about faith vs. cynicism, Uncle says: Kerry’s faith that he can get us out of this mess, and Bush’s cynical manipulation of the voters.
