I Can See Healthcare From Here

DETROIT - As I wake each morning here in Detroit at the US
Social
Forum, I glance just a few hundred yards across the way, and I know
people have
healthcare without regard to financial or other barriers. And it hurts
like hell to see the cars "over there" winding along the river inside
Canada
and know that as I sit here in my own nation, I am without the basic
human
right to healthcare just because I am an American.

The feeling I get every time I glance that direction is the same
one I had when I was a patient in Cuba during the filming of SiCKO. I
feel sick to my stomach with anger and sadness and wonder why I have
spent the
past 25 years of my life fighting for healthcare that in other nations --
other
rich nations and other poor nations - is long accepted as what people in
a civilized
society extend to and protect for one another.

I am gut-punched all over again. I want to curl up in a ball
on the floor of my room and weep. I want to rage at the top of my lungs
until the pain pours out somewhere else. I want to grab my husband and
my
kitty and a few of my old family photos and go where my life is valued
enough
to allow me to seek and receive care when we need it. Yes, I admit
it. I am sick to death of the excuses for why we cannot extend
healthcare
to all without bankrupting folks, and I sometime dream of escape from it
all.

At the US Social Forum, the potential to gather many voices and
many forces together to move toward healthcare justice in this nation
may or
may not fully materialize. Sometimes the voices at the microphone
calling
for transformative health reform are as controlling and power-hungry as
those
who run the for-profit, medical-industrial complex. The loudest voices
speak with officious verbiage and self-righteous certainty that can
squeeze out
the meek or those without the required activist pedigrees. In many
movements for social change, there is an intricate power structure that
can be
hard to understand and even harder to accept.

Those of us who believe that the for-profit health care system --
not just the for-profit health insurance industry -- must be broken apart
to
save lives, to save homes, to save families and to save this nation,
must get
to the point where swimming to the other side of this profit-powered
river of
healthcare delivery and finally changing this awful, brutal mess means
so much
to us that we are willing to let it be a people's movement not its own
hierarchical system of political ineffectiveness. The mission must be
getting to healthcare for everyone and not who gets us there. We have
to
throw it all in together if we are ever to change it.

The power of the medical-industrial complex in this nation is
that
the thieves stay in bed with each other against all forces that would
break up
their game. Providers simultaneously speak ill of insurance giants but
then court the best contracts with them. Even providers who claim to
want
to see transformative change in the system sue patients into bankruptcy
to
collect deductibles after those lucrative contracts negotiated with
insurance
carriers leave some portion of the bill unpaid. It isn't just their
money
and raw greed that buys influence over the system of political power,
it's also
their intense loyalty to one another and codependence on the sources of
their
profit margins -- not unlike how the mob operates. Break out of the
fold,
and they'll break your knees.

And, sadly, thousands and thousands of those who even support
single-payer reform in their non-working hours are beholden to the
system for
their healthy incomes and lifestyles many patients will never attain.
It's hard to trust someone whose collection agency is garnishing your
wages
when they try to say they aren't an inside player in this mess with a
vested
interest in making changes that protect the money they must have to
protect the
style of living to which they have become so accustomed.

Too often in movements for huge social change -- like the health
reform movement -- we get tied up in the process and who is running the
show,
which expert is expert enough and who is at the microphone speaking to
the
lowly, less articulate minions instead of hanging together against the
forces
that we seek to overthrow. This tragedy is a people's tragedy, a
patients' tragedy, a least-among-us tragedy. If we won't even value
those
voices in the process -- if we believe the stories and the pain no longer
matters -- then we do not believe in the basic human right to anything.

I am not sure we can transform the healthcare system in this
nation
unless we first stand at the edge of the river looking over to
healthcare as a
basic human right on the other side and share deeply enough the rage and
the
pain and the frustration of our sisters and our brothers who have been
hurting
for so long. We must then become united against all forces that would
divide us against the primary goal of achieving healthcare for all. We
have to rage together against a system that has ravaged so many lives
and
robbed us of so much human potential along the way -- and we must not
rage
against one another for not having the perfect approach or the perfect
pedigree
or the perfect PhD or MD or JD.

The river and a bridge are all that physically separate me today
from healthcare as a basic human right and the travesty of healthcare as
a
privilege of the sufficiently privileged. But the river of social and
political change that separates me from healthcare as a basic human
right is
potentially much more difficult to bridge, unless we embrace and lift
all
voices. Raising millions of voices for change requires valuing what
those
voices have to offer to the chorus. All voices in, no voices out.

I am sick to death of fighting this terrible system to secure
healthcare for my husband and myself. That struggle has consumed much
beyond
our health and our meager wealth. I don't ever again want to glance
across the way and see relief and know it could have been ours in this
nation
if only we'd fought the right enemy.