Ever since I was a little girl living in rural East Tennessee, I remember seeing jars by the cash registers of drugstores, convenience stores and small supermarkets. The jars had hand-lettered signs, often accompanied by black and white photographs, asking for donations for a young boy’s cancer treatment, a father’s hospital bills from an accident, or some other dire medical emergency for which a family had no health care and no money.  Signs announcing cake walks for the same kinds of causes would litter the same store.  For those unfamiliar with the cake walk, it goes like this: people (women) bake cakes and donate them.  At the cakewalk, usually held in a church social hall or school gym, the cakes  are placed on large tables around a room. People pay a fee and then walk around the tables of cakes to music until it stops.  They then get the cake they stop in front of.  The game continues until all the cakes are claimed. If one wants extra chances, one pays another fee.  It’s kind of like musical chairs. With cakes. For people without insurance.  Those jars litter the counters of stores still.

                At the same time I was growing up, my cousin’s wife, a nurse, used to volunteer several days a week to head up into the Appalachian hill country to administer health services to people who had never seen a medical professional.  And just a couple of years ago, a friend who was studying for her RN had, as part of her degree requirements, to board a bus with other nurses, doctors and dentists and head to West Virginia to see hundreds of people who had never had  any kind of health care.  My friend was shocked:  she saw forty-year-old women with no teeth, men in the seventies who had never seen a doctor.  The group did mammograms, exams, children’s exams.  It was a grueling and eye-opening long weekend.

                Now that I am no longer on my ex-husband’s insurance policy my insurance is twice as much per month, has a large deductible (where I had none) and my medicines cost me sixty percent of their retail cost.  Additionally, the medication is doled out as the insurance company sees fit: I could not refill my migraine medication today because it was too soon in the month.  Apparently I am allowed only nine (or fewer if I need two pills) migraines a month:  If I happen to have more, then I am shit out of luck, as they say.

                               And a Republican senator on CSpan today actually said that ours was a “patient-centered” system.

                The bill that will finally get to the Senate for a vote this weekend is an incredible compromise.  Even at 2700 hundred pages, it’s a watered down version of the House bill, which is nothing to write home about.  And the chance that these two bills will have to be reconciled in order for them to pass at all is slim.  Mitch McConnell assured the American public that “we will not have a health care bill by Christmas, which is a good thing.”  Other Senators won’t vote in favor of the bill because they feel “rushed.”  As if they shouldn’t have been thinking about and considering health care for the past year since the election, knowing full well that the issue was at the top of President Obama’s to-do list.

                Obama’s’ leadership on this issue has been questioned by better and brighter than I.  I wonder most why the idea of a single payer system was not offered up at the first so that any compromises could have gotten us much farther than we are now.  I wonder that Obama did not spend some of his capital early in the game to assure a victory that would be a real victory, and not a panacea to the American public after months of ugly wrangling and a deep dip in the President’s popularity.  Even though he can’t pass health care alone, I fear that if the bill as it is passes now it will not be enough to convince the American public that something real has been done, that actual change has been effected.  Because it hasn’t.

                Even as the Republicans say over and over that Americans don’t want health care reform, the truth is that we do.  We do.  And anyone who thinks the current system can stand as it is without bankrupting more and more Americans is playing a fool’s game.  Painting the government as an evil entity who will take health care choices away from good, God-fearing Americans, is just the same as the Congresspeople sayin that they themselves are evil.  That may actually  be true: The majority of our Congress is corrupt, evil, self-absorbed and out of touch with the people they govern.  They are bought and paid for by big industry including Big Pharma, banks, and insurance companies.  One radio host has suggested that our Congress wear their sponsors on their suits as racecar drivers do.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  Then we could see who is in thrall to whom.

                Meanwhile, no matter what happens with the new health care bill, which is hardly reform, there will still be people who cannot afford health insurance. I simply do not understand how forcing people to buy health care and claiming that their costs will be lower (when they most likely did not have care in the first place) makes any sense. Additionally, it seems to be that the cost of the subsidies to the poor in order to help them purchase health care will be more costly in the long run than a single payer system or a Medicare buy-in or a government option. We all know that at this point, no reigns will be placed on either the costs of drugs or the costs of premiums. Subsidies will have to rise as the insurance companies continue to strangle the people and as Big Pharma raises its prices as it wishes.

                I wish I could be content with the small measures that the Senate and House have finally taken to reform health care. But if it has taken forty years to get this far, if Obama’s falling popularity causes him to lose in 2012, if Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2010, even the small inroads that have been made will be rescinded. And more and more of us will have to resort to asking our neighbors for help, in the guise of a social event.