Health insurance denies those who can't pay

Health insurance is in the news but for all the wrong reasons.

In a September 22 article, the New York Times announced that the federal government has dropped a bomb on New York health officials, stating that chemotherapy does not qualify for coverage under the government-financed program for emergency medical care. Before the announcement, illegal immigrants could have chemotherapy sessions paid for by emergency medical care.

I wonder what really motivated this change of heart: did government officials truly believe that chemotherapy, and the inevitable death that would result from its absence, does not truly fall under an “emergency,” or that illegal immigrants were receiving medical care amidst a fierce national debate of the immigration issue?

Critics say this is one more of the Bush administration’s efforts to deny the uninsured from public health services. If the health insurance lobbyists were applying pressure, the theory is plausible. For the past year, health insurance companies and health care providers have undergone a firestorm of criticism. People are dying in waiting rooms waiting for care, but it matters not, unless you have the money to pay. It’s as if our country is telling the nation’s poor, “Too bad your minimum wage job doesn’t provide insurance. If you get sick and die, it’s your own fault because you can’t afford health insurance.”

An ironic twist to the federal government’s decision on chemotherapy: After years of lobbying, advocates for breast cancer patients were able to pressure the federal government to implement free or low-cost breast cancer screening to uninsured women provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a spit in the face of those who are uninsured and suffering from cancer. You can get diagnosed for cancer, but if you don’t have the money, you’re not going to get the treatment.

People are getting fed up with the current disorganization and high costs of health insurance. The problem has reached such proportions, democratic presidential candidate, Hilary Clinton, is using a reformed single-payer health insurance program as one of her platforms, the same program her husband promoted during his presidency with little success. But these are changing times. Even die-hard conservatives are scratching their heads over the health insurance problem and thinking, uhhh, this is a problem. For years, my Aunt Anita spoke vehemently against those who supported universal health care, saying such people were driven by a “selfish, take-care-of-me” attitude. Last week, I spoke to her about the issue, and she said of the current state of health care, shaking her head, “God, what a mess!”

Even the revered Lords of Sports have dealt with the mighty slap of privatized health care. The NFL Union spoke to Congress, asking for greater authority to approve disability claims. Former Dallas Cowboys star Daryl Johnston summed up the problem with this particularly powerful quote, “We have no voice and we have no bargaining power. The money is there to fix the problem.” This is quite a contradiction to the Olympian standards of ancient Greece, where Olympic athletes were treated with a lifetime of care, housing and food. The current state has reached such an abysmal state that the older players who built the league into what it is today are reduced to beggars denied the respect they deserve for the remainder of their lives. They beat their bodies and exposed themselves to injuries to entertain us, the American people. Yet, even sport legends are not immune to denial of health care.

Is Fox News biased?

My uncle asked me yesterday where I like to get my news.

I shrugged and said, “I read the New York Times online and I listen to CNN on my satellite radio—“

“Whoa, whoa,” he said, waving his arms in a dramatic gesture. “CNN is the most biased thing you can watch on TV.”

“It is?”

“They always make the story how they want it to be. They don’t give you the truth. It’s just one side- that’s all your getting. They’re always doing reports against the war— they’re as bad as ABC News or CBS News. And they’re always putting down the President. You want to know where you can watch honest news that doesn’t twist the facts, where they give you news with no bias?”

“MSNBC?” I guessed. He dropped his shoulders in exasperation.

"No. Fox News.” Deadpan.

I burst out laughing. Surely, my uncle was joking. Even conservatives acknowledge that Fox News is a place to receive staunchly Republican news from a conservative perspective.

My cousins grew so disgusted with the channel’s one-sided reporting, they blocked the channel from their cable receiver.

“What a crock of crap,” I said. “Fox News is the most biased set of propaganda I’ve ever seen.”

Again, deadpan. “I am serious,” my uncle said. “You watch those other news channels and then you watch Fox News, and you will see that Fox News gives you the whole story without any bias what-so-ever.”

I couldn’t believe this was a real conversation. How could my uncle be so naïve? Maybe I’m the one that is naïve. I haven’t watched Fox News in years— maybe it’s changed. It got me thinking, is there such a thing as fair and balanced reporting in broadcast today?

I think if viewers reviewed most news stories, they would find that bias is not as prevalent as believed. Bias is often perception. If a story doesn’t jive with the way the viewer wants the world to be, then they think the story is “biased.” For instance with my uncle, any news story that portrays the war or President George Bush negatively is "biased," which basically means that Fox News is the only remaining "unbiased" station, reporting information in a way that reinforces my uncles own ideology of the world.

News organizations, acting out of fairness, feel obliged to report these political claims of bias, and in a twist or irony, their sense of fairness is their detriment. By reporting these bias claims, news organizations perpetuate distrust among the public in the fairness of news.

The real bias in broadcast, however, comes through loud and clear as political commentators on cable channels spout their opinions cloaked as “political analysis.”

There is the argument that journalists display bias in the very stories they choose to write about, and, to an extent, that is true. But contrary to the general perception that journalists infiltrate each story with a predisposed agenda, many journalists make a conscientious effort to avoid bias in their stories. Except for Fox News. They really blow my mind

Maybe I'm wrong. They report. You decide.

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Monday, 9:16 p.m., Sept. 17

A lawsuit over a flat iron

Few drawbacks to universal health care

In response to Jesse Podroza’s request for information on the drawbacks of Universal Health Care, here is some information I found:

Although in countries with a single-payer system of health care everyone has access to basic levels of care, but there are quotas and planned waiting times.

The standard care plan is developed by government physicians and officials who decide what provisions will be covered and how certain conditions will be treated, according to a June 30 article on CNN.com.

Health care analyst Paul Keckley said as many as 15 to 20 percent of the population in these countries buys medical services outside the government-run health care system through supplemental insurance or by purchasing services out of pocket. The people who pay more for their health care tend to be in the upper income level or have complicated conditions, according to the article.

So in brief, the problems include long waiting lines, and special conditions may not be covered under universal health care.

But when you consider that the United States is ranked 37 for it’s health care system by the World Health Organization, a far cry from smaller nations like France and Canada who occupy the top 10 list, the few faults mentioned above seem trivial when compared to the nightmare of the United States private health care system.

When cancer patients are dying because they can’t afford insurance, I think that should indicate to us that they system needs to be reorganized.

One of my aunts suspects she has the cancer susceptibility gene BRCA2, which could up her likelihood of getting cancer by 85 percent. But there's no way she’s getting tested for the gene. Her doctor pretty much guaranteed if her tests came back positive for the gene, her insurance would, inevitably, drop her or charge her exorbitant premiums.

Now isn’t that the ultimate irony? The person who would need the insurance the most, someone with a high likelihood of developing cancer in his/her lifetime, is the person private health insurance would dismiss as too risky.

From the information I have gathered, I am more inclined to lean towards a single-payer health care system for the United States, but I do want both sides. I have yet to find information with a balanced representation of the pros and cons of both private health insurance and universal health care. If you find a source of information that discusses the topic without bias, let me know. I want to read it.

Farmers are the unsung heroes

Have you ever had a day when it seems fate is set upon doing you in?

Last Saturday was one of those days. Although angry clouds furled in the sky, the stagnant air hung around me like a cloying blanket, hot and stuffy without a single breeze for relief. I was sweating profusely beneath gray clouds, dragging dead tree branches away from the old pecan trees on my Papa’s land.

Over the past year, my Papa’s pasture had grown to Amazon proportions and because he needed the sale of the pecans to make the payment on the land, we were moving heavy boughs from around the tree trunks so my fiance could brush-hog beneath the trees. (For those unfamiliar with brush-hogging, it is the equivalent to mowing, except it is a piece of machinery attached to a tractor to mow large expanses of land, like pasture.)

As the hours passed from noon to evening, my arms ached from moving limbs and burned from scratching myself on burrs and thorny grapevines that threatened to consume the trees. But as my resolve waned with the darkening skies, my Papa, perpetually the workaholic, kept insisting, “Just one more. Just this one more tree.”

Soon, the clouds hovering above with an ominous threat burst as if heaven’s flood gates had exploded. Torrents of rain poured down upon us, its silvery fingers lashing our faces and clothes, obscuring our vision, but still Papa insisted upon moving the dead limbs and brush-hogging. “Just one more tree. We can get this last tree.”

Then a loud crack split through the air. I turned and a thick limb the size of a mature tree fell to the ground where I had stood just minutes before. I stepped back unnerved. Only an hour ago, I had been thinking about a teenage couple who had posed beneath an old tree for their senior pictures, when the tree dilapidated on top of them. The boy had died.

My fiance, Chris, perched on the tractor, waved for me to get away from the tree.

“There’s no telling what this old tree will do!” Chris yelled in the escalating pace of the storm, the lightening slicing through the sky as peals of thunder echoed overhead. “We need to get out from under here!” He looked at my Papa and said, “John, I think it’s time we call it a night!” And my Papa finally relented.

I hopped onto the tractor with Chris, the machine’s canopy providing no cover in the lashing rain. My Papa hopped in his truck, and we hightailed it out of there.

As the rain slapped our faces, Chris yelled over the roar of the tractor and the rain how relieved he was I had escaped the falling tree branch unscathed. “That could have killed you!“ he yelled, his face somber.

Chris drove the tractor around a thick, silver guiding cord connected to a tall electric tower, hoping his change in direction would guide my grandfather.

He glanced back, and his face went pale. “Your Papa is going to hit that power cord!”

I craned to look behind me, and my papa’s white pick-up truck was headed straight for the cord. Chris and I screamed, waving our arms, “Papa…Papa…Papa…Papa!” But he was oblivious, the cacophony of his truck engine, the pouring rain and our tractor drowning out the screams. The rain fell like slanted glass, blinding in the headlights. The cord faded into the rain’s jagged angles.

My heart thudded in my chest, and fear enveloped me, with one word emblazoned before my eyes, “Noooooooooooooooooooo” but the only word I could croak, yell, scream, plead over and over was, “Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa!”

But it was too late.

His truck grazed the side of the cord, giving my heart a squelching hope, then his side-mirror popped off with the sound of a bullet. Papa figuring out his mistake, sped up, but the cord caught on his truck’s cab. The head of the electric tower snapped and electric cords viciously ripped in two, striking the air with luminescent currents like writhing snakes.

My heart stopped. Time stopped. My body went numb. The tears made my lips taste salty. Shocked, stunned, in grief, I could only scream a monotonous chant, “Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa.”

But the cord, hung on my papa’s cab, secured the head as it bobbed in the wind beside the tower. If my grandfather moved any farther, the cab would snap the cord, and the looming plank, with electric currents sizzling from its head, would land on my papa’s truck. Only years before, my uncle, my papa’s brother, had been electrocuted to death, the volts from an electric tower so powerful they exploded his truck.

Chris wrapped his arm around my waist, and yelled, “Don’t you dare! Goddamit, don‘t you dare!“ How could he know the rushed thoughts and calculations running through my mind: how could I jump off the tractor, avert the brush-hog and run to my Papa’s truck, rapt his window and stop him? “Stay where you are!“ Chris yelled.

And as if by saving grace, my grandfather slammed the truck in brake and emerged from the front seat.

I didn’t even feel relief. I was still in shock. I thought my Papa was going to die, and it wracked my soul with numb fear. I just couldn’t trust that things were okay yet.

No hugs were exchanged. We just stood in the rain, terrified and in disbelief.

After some perusing online, I discovered that farming was listed as the six most dangerous job in America by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with 41.1 farmers and ranchers dying per 100,000.

The potential to get harmed on a farm reaches astronomical heights when dangerous machinery, unpredictable animals, falling trees and uncontrollable weather are added to the equation. Yet for their sacrifices, farmers seem to have been discarded in our political environment for large corporations. It is not uncommon to hear of farmers in southern Oklahoma having raised chickens or hogs for national food chains, only to get paid embarrassing, meager sums for hard work that is often stinky and tiring.

Farmers really are the unsung heroes of our country. While the cost for producing crops climbs and the economic plight of agriculture fluctuates to dangerous levels, these men and women put their lives on the line, slaving in the heat, rain and cold (which, in Oklahoma, can happen all in one day) to provide the public with amenities, such as food and textiles. In addition, they do jobs that allow the public to live in comfort, knowing food is as close as the next grocery store.

In other thoughts…

I wanted to apologize to DL and any of the other readers I disappointed in my last blog. DL is exactly right. September 6 blog was just a rehash of other articles and actually did what I complained about in my Journalism Ethics class: blogging that is merely a regurgitation of facts. I will try to not make this mistake again, and I encourage all of you guys to critique me and point out the faults in my writing. I’m a student after all. I want to learn from my mistakes and serve you, the readers, better.

I also wanted to applaud Dawn Pamplin’s efforts to rescue mistreated pit bulls and find them loving owners through the Oklahoma Bully Breed Rescue program. As the owner of five dogs, including two beautiful pit bull terriers, I can contend that these dogs are very sweet and loving. I truly think that socialization is the culprit of the breed’s infamous stereotype. Many of the people who get pit bulls do so because they want a vicious, aggressive animal, and they ensure these animals behave according to this standard in the way they treat their animals. Chris and I have had She-ra and Cronus for four years. We shower them with love and affection, and that is how they tend to respond to others, even strangers. We often joke that they would make the worst guard dogs because as soon as a person comes up to our door they roll over, eager for a belly rub.