Follow Up on G-d Please Protect Me from the Government Health Care My Father Gets
by: Craig Wiesner on August 10th, 2009 A while back I wrote a post about the incredibly wonderful health care my father receives from the VA. I got a lot of comments on that post, including questions about the disease afflicting my father and the medication that caused his condition to worsen. I write this new post with two thoughts in mind.
1. Government health care can be superb and Americans need to know that the United States government can do, and does do, an excellent job caring for our veterans through the VA and for our senior citizens through Medicare. (Yes, I know the VA is far from perfect, but my experience with them has been fantastic.)
2. There’s a disease out there that is often mis-diagnosed and being put on the wrong medication can and does kill people. I want folks to know about this disease so that they can protect themselves and their loved ones from being put on the wrong medication.
For part one, I recommend folks read my original post by
clicking here. (You can do that later, after you read part 2.)
<snip>
So why am I posting this on Tikkun Daily? For one, the staff at Tikkun/NSP and many of the volunteers have traveled with my husband and me on this difficult journey as we lost my mother two years ago and as we’ve been caring for my father ever since. Two, health care is a social justice issue, one that is being screamed and yelled about by people who are trying to STOP the debate and prevent our country from moving forward on repairing our health care system. Beyond the paid shills and the fearful zealots, there is a lot to discuss and debate, and we should be discussing the best way to provide good health care to ALL Americans. Three, I believe my mother was killed by and my father was on the way to being killed by America’s current health care system. Their HMO took our tax dollars and my parents’ co-payments and provided absolutely awful medical care. Why should we continue to pay twice as much as other industrialized nations, live shorter life spans, lose more babies, and watch people’s lives destroyed when we can fix this mess?
We have only a few months to get this fixed. So, if today I helped someone identify why their mother or father is seeing things, moving during sleep, and having other mental and physical problems, hurray. And if I dispel the myth about government health care being a bad thing, double hurray.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why I typed G-d instead of including the ‘O’……. it’s a Jewish thing (an old habit).
Oh oh….. and if you read all the way to the very bottom of this post (good for you), here’s a bonus. The Canadian woman who is all over TV claiming that Canadian health care would have made her wait six months to treat her (cancer) tumor…….. turns out she’s a liar! Whoda guessed that? Click
here or
here for more about that.
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/08/10/follow-up-on-g-d-please-protect-me-from-the-government-health-care-my-father-gets/