Nicole Foy put a face on the largely faceless 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. Her name is Bonnie Terry and she died last year in San Antonio from breast cancer.
Foy, an Express-News medical writer, didn’t know Terry but lovingly, and with her standard attention to detail, gathered information for her two-part report, published March 4 and 5, by interviewing Terry’s friends and advocates and studying her medical charts.
“Bonnie’s story,” Foy wrote, ” … is that of one woman’s frustrating and frightening medical odyssey through a fractured health care system that excludes a large and growing number of Americans.”
It was a sad narrative, and it exposed a loose thread that this and other U.S. newspapers must continue to unravel to prod America’s leadership to join the progressive nations of the world that provide medical coverage to all citizens.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was here last week touting a universal health care plan. I hope his rivals will too, Democrats and Republicans. What I can’t understand though is why this is a partisan issue. If the water supply of 46 million Americans were threatened, Congress would move quickly and unanimously to correct the problem.
The critics — usually those with a financial stake in maintaining the status quo — argue that a single, regulated health care umbrella amounts to “socialized medicine.” They said it when President Truman proposed universal health care after World War II and when LBJ hustled Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.
But few people complain about socialized police, fire or military protection, socialized public education or interstate highways. Shouldn’t all taxpayers also have access to good health care?
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I believe America’s Founding Fathers, in the Preamble to the Constitution, established a blueprint for universal health care with this phrase: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare …”
Make no mistake, it will be difficult to create a fair and equitable health care system out of the Rube Goldberg contraption we have now. How, for example, can any U.S. policymaker justify a system that allows such abnormalities as this?
General Motors, literally and figuratively the U.S. economic engine of the last century, is closing plants and buying out workers to meet its health insurance obligations, while Wal-Mart, this century’s corporate king, advises its low-paid workers to enroll their kids in government-subsidized health care.
The leaders of a nation that prides itself on its freedoms, on being classless, on “liberty and justice for all,” should be ashamed of a health care system that allows 46 million people — 5.6 million of them from the Lone Star State — to fall through the cracks.
But, I suppose, if you’re listening to the fella who has the most to lose, who’s a big campaign donor, you can “spin” it by saying: Hey, four out of five Americans have health care!
Nicole Foy was busy last week answering readers’ reaction to Bonnie Terry’s story. On Friday, I interrupted her with an e-mail asking: What’s the consensus? A minute later she stood before me in the newsroom riffling a sheaf of about 100 readers’ responses.
“The consensus,” she said, “is, ‘How many Bonnies are there?’”
The answer: potentially millions. As Foy is learning, Bonnie’s story is the tip of the iceberg.
I hope the Express-News medical and political teams and its Editorial Page staff will keep this issue alive in the roughly year and a half before the next federal election.
The war in the Middle East is important. So is protecting our borders and global warming. But America’s leadership sooner or later must address the health care mess. If newspapers are dying, what a way to go out in style: by forcing U.S. lawmakers to provide all Americans with a better way to live and die.
