God and Your Country Are Not With You

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

There must not be a tea-bagger alive who has ever had to sit all night in the Charity hospital in a city like New Orleans, waiting for the morning shift to call their number.

In hospitals across America, the uninsured wait there through the night in the midst of all that painful sickness, some with swine flu, others on the verge of a heart attack.

Others sit there in agony reading old magazines and drinking bad coffee, waiting for something as simple as a cup of pink-cocktail, the drink they mix for those who suffer severe acid reflux disease, a malady that sometimes hurts in your chest so bad you think you are having a heart attack. It is a mix of the anti-acid Maalox, Novocain to numb the esophagus, and the tranquilizer Xanax to relax the muscles and relieve the pain.

The only place you can get it in the U.S. is in a hospital emergency room. They serve it by the drink there, in a little plastic cup — for about $1,000 a drink.

I don’t know if there is a specific provision in the health-care reform bill just passed in the House to make sure poor people who need it can get that drink — without losing their houses or any chance at credit if they can’t pay that bill. But if a so-called “public option” means the hospital cannot deny you that drink and that the government must pay for it, the Senate better vote for that bill, and not just to save America’s poor.

Every time a poor person, who may be poor by no fault of their own, has to seek treatment in an emergency room, the doctors who get paid $700 an hour to treat them send the bill out anyway, knowing the cost will be borne by the rising costs of the bills of those who do have insurance. What do the insurance companies do to continue making their 30 percent profit so they can pay their white male executives a million dollars a year? They raise rates on everybody else, of course, which is the number one factor contributing to the growing squeeze on the middle class.

It is a vicious cycle that escalates until a few people have all the money and most people have none.

That, my friends and enemies, is not even close to the American dream everybody seems to be so concerned about, including the far-right lunatics who believe it should be legal to shoot the president not only because he is black, but because he had the gall to propose that poor people deserve to be treated for their maladies — just like everybody else.

We are a people who have completely forgotten our history, like the Baptists in the South who cannot answer the simple question: What was the man’s name who founded the Baptist Church?

How can we forget that our most visible symbol of liberty contains the words, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, longing to be free.”

It is kind of hard to feel free in this country if you cannot get a job that pays enough to house and feed yourself, much less one that provides health insurance.

Do the tea baggers even know the stories of their families who came here to escape one oppression or another at one time in history? That is why most of us are here, after all, except for those of us who descend from the natives. We all mostly agree Native Americans deserve a version of health care of their own in return for the genocide we committed against their people — as long as they are willing to be segregated and live on a reservation.

Are the rich not willing to allow the waitresses who serve them to be treated when they get sick? What about the guy who cuts the grass, or the writer you like to read so much on the Web?

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