- A Face of Health Care Reform
Julia and I have a very dear friend who, post divorce, and confronting the vagaries of life with determination – he began, this semester, an educational program aimed at a new career – has health insurance for his young daughter, but none for himself. A week ago he began feeling a “squeezing” pain in his chest, near his heart, and extending into his left shoulder and arm. It hurt. He took his daughter home to her mother and over the next two days debated with himself – much as my father did thirty-six years ago – whether what he was feeling merited action. Finally, he went to the emergency room at USC University Hospital – a public, county hospital – in Los Angeles. After waiting five hours without being seen, he went home. The pain did not go away. Two days later he returned, waited thirteen hours, and was checked into a room. Tests so far show enzyme levels indicating that he experienced some kind of cardiac “event.” He is waiting on more tests.
Had his face hit the floor, of course, he would have been seen immediately.
- from The Sad Red Reporter (Sunday March 28, 2010 Edition, with thanks to the New York Times)
At the Tea Party Express rally in Searchlight, Nevada, Sarah Palin declared, ““We’re saying the big government, big debt, Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree is over, you’re fired!” she told the crowd. “We’re not going to sit down and shut up.”
“People huddled under blankets with their children and their coffee makers, and walked up the hills around the site carrying American and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s campaign tried to lure attendees to its own rally with doughnut holes and “herbal tea, because, a spokesman said, the Tea Party crowd did not seem to need more caffeine.”
“‘Liar, Thug, Traitor, Commie Usurper,’ read one woman’s homemade poster, next to a picture of President Obama as the devil.”
Speaker after speaker – including “Debbie Landis, the leader of Anger Is Brewing, a Nevada Tea Party group and local sponsor of the event” – “denounced Democrats for portraying Tea Party members as angry and violent.”
AJA
Definition:
tea party: n., lowercase because unrecognized as legitimate; not a party at all, political or otherwise; stand-in representative for the uninformed; too long steeped to be refreshin; too many fringe leaves with bitter taste; not to be poured to soothe. . . .
This is so goddamn sad. The collective hysteria/psychosis of these people makes me sadder than almost anything else. This is where faith in the better angels of the human race is truly necessary, for evidence of our better angels is sorely missing, and being deliberately obscured.