113. Medical Care

            Here in the United States we have excellent medical care. We are the leader of the pack in medical research and our doctors, nurses, health care professionals and medical schools are the best. It’s extremely unfortunate that all of our populace is unable to access this wonderful system where they can be healed in so many of their ailments.

            In this country there is a meritocracy and so much of it is based upon how much money you have. Nowhere is that more painfully obvious than in our excellent healthcare system. In this country if you don’t have a healthy income or a job that gives you a solid medical insurance plan you may as well live in a third world country where there is little to no healthcare.

            Here in Idaho the citizenry voted to cover people whose income was too low to get good or any health insurance. The majority voted to cover those people with Medicare from our state, no strings attached. Our elective representatives felt that was, perhaps, too magnanimous and voted to restrict that Medicare eligibility with a work requirement. On the surface that sounds ok, but the reality is that some people are so stricken by disease that they can’t work very much, if at all. Furthermore, the only way to keep track of who is meeting those requirements will necessitate a red taped bureaucracy that will increase the cost to our citizenry to the extent that it would be cheaper to simply cover the indigent with a guaranteed healthcare system. While the majority of our citizens believe healthcare is a basic human right, our elected officials didn’t get the memo. They apparently don’t believe the sick and poor merit the basic structure of life itself. I believe that sometimes our basic belief in hard work can actually get in the way of taking care of ourselves. This can be seen no better than in the fact that we have one of the best, if not the best, medical care systems in the world yet our august representatives who gained their right to represent us still hold on to a meritocracy that in no way represents what they themselves merit.

            So while I am so thankful for a great health care system in my country, I am also quite dismayed that the most excellent system is, more often than  not, denied to the very people that need it the most: the poor and the sick.