What future holds for health care, science and roads

I’ve just returned from New York City, where my brother was mowed down by a taxi on his morning run. He was in the ICU, intubated, for three days; has undergone four operations. He knows he’ll never run again and will be lucky to recover to the point of walking. With a walker.

The obvious, the cliché, is that things can change in an instant: Live every day as if it’s your next to last. Would that we all could; though nowadays I doubt every human would spend it lovingly.

Also obvious: Anyone who dismisses Democrats’ urgency in improving our health care system has never been really sick.

My brother and his wife can afford supplemental nursing care. They can afford a lawyer, not only for the legal issues but for help with the dizzying paperwork. Pages and pages of it. Bills coming from all directions, staggering bills. Traveling only four blocks between hit and hospital, the ambulance charges alone were in the thousands of dollars. Despite passing much of the work along to the lawyer, my sister-in-law has spent hours dealing with approvals and refusals; speaking, emailing, texting to various agencies and offices. For many, probably most people, it’d be all but impossible.

The care he’s received in NYC has been excellent. Still, communication has been occasionally spotty, and were it not for the extra help they hired, my brother’s needs would be met more erratically. Too slowly, in some cases, as he is entirely, helplessly, bedridden.

To those people whose reaction to health care reform proposals from any Democrat is a knee-jerk cry of “socialism, communism, they hate America,” one hopes none has to experience what my brother and his family are going through. If they ever do, and if Mitch McConnell has managed to keep things the same (or, as Republican legislators prefer, improved them only for insurance executives and stockholders), and if Trump’s lies about Democrats and “socialism” continue to infect their minds, I hope they have the education and monetary means of my brother and his wife. I’m not saying reform won’t be disruptive or complicated, or won’t include unanticipated glitches. What I am saying is it’s undeniably necessary.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-what-future-holds-for-health-care-science-and-roads/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=21829678fc-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-21829678fc-228635337