My Dad and Universal Health Care
My dad was one of the hardest working men ever, and that’s a quote from an older cousin of mine who went to work for him and immediately started looking for an easier job. Born in Texas in 1906, my dad left school after the 6th grade to pick cotton with his family. Later as a teenager, he started working on his own in the oilfields of West Texas. His first sick leave was in his late teens when his Ford Model T kicked back during a crank-start, breaking his arm. His father, my grandfather, shamed him as a freeloader when he moved back home to recuperate. So after he healed up, my dad worked his way out to San Francisco, California. He helped construct the San Francisco Bay Bridge (the San Francisco side that is still in use today). He served in the Army Air Corps through WWII as a B-25 mechanic. He might have continued as an airplane mechanic after the war, he had a job offer, but he hated the noise.
He worked as a construction foreman throughout my life, building roadside billboards. He didn’t take his second sick leave until he was in his 50’s and fell off of a billboard under construction, broke three ribs, punctured a lung, and told the crew to keep working while he drove himself to the hospital in his old 1947 Dodge pickup.
President Kennedy spoke on the subject of government funded health care at Madison Square Garden on May 20, 1962. Being 10 at the time, I have no recollection of that JFK speech, but my dad was a staunch New Deal Democrat and very pro-Kennedy. He would have watched this speech on TV.
In the couple of years before JFK MediCare speech, my father had watched a good friend get sick, diagnosed with cancer, drain the family savings through health care bills, then die, leaving his family in a difficult situation. My Dad would have watched the speech feeling sick, knowing his friend’s tragic story, knowing that he was years away from the Social Security he had been paying into, and knowing that anything Kennedy might get done would likely be too late to help him and his family.
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Fifteen days after JFK’s speech, my brother and I went off to school on a Monday morning. My mother went off to a job at a sandwich shop she had recently started since my dad had been unwell. My father, home alone, sure that his upcoming diagnosis would be cancer, wrote a note about how miserable he was and how he did not want to play out the same scenario that his friend had. He called the police, told them where to find him, took his handgun out to the garage, and insured that the family savings account, such as it was, would not be drained to pay for medical bills. He was 56, I was 10.
My late wife needed a lot of health care a few years ago. We were ok, because I was employed with really good health benefits and we both qualified for Medicare on top of that. But I can’t help think about what a health situation like ours would have been like for a family without decent employer health coverage and maybe just a few years younger and too young for Medicare. The tragedy and stress would be greatly multiplied. It would likely pile other tragedies on top of the health one.
All of the other countries in the world anywhere close to being our economic peers take care of their citizens, all of them, not just the privileged few. It was interesting that in the recent World Cup, all of the competing countries have some form of universal health care, … except one” the USA. What is wrong with us as a country that we can’t take care of our own? The answer is money. Too many very rich people make money off of health care, so there is a deeply vested interest in our current disfunctional system. It’s interesting to imagine how many Americans might quit their corporate jobs and try to start a small business or pursue some creative endeavor if their health care were not tied to their job.
Universal health care is not some giveaway for freeloaders. It would be our country taking care of its own. I’m sick of the specious abstract political arguments against universal health care. If there was ever a man who took personal responsibility for paying his own way, it was my dad, but the system he worked so hard in failed him. I’m also tired of opinionated Americans who just don’t know how it works in other countries.
There are many stories like my dad’s all over this country. People who have taken responsibility all their lives can get caught up short by sickness or injury resulting in all sorts of tragedies, from suicide to homelessness. There is nothing wrong with government passing laws which “promote the general welfare”, that phrase is in the very first sentence of the U.S. Constitution.
