First Lady Michelle Obama is making the news in support of her husband’s health plan, hoping to tap into the energies of one group who voted for Obama in large numbers: women. Reform is everyone’s concern, but in many ways it occupies a specific gender niche. As reported by Voice of America’s Kent Klein,
Mrs. Obama says health care reform is a women’s issue. “Women play a unique and increasingly significant role in our families. We know the pain, because we are usually the ones dealing with it,” she said. The first lady spoke Friday to a gathering of women near the White House, and said the state of the U.S. health care system is unacceptable. “For two years on the campaign trail, this was what I heard from women: That they were being crushed, crushed by the current structure of our health care. Crushed,” she said.
A host of women’s groups, blogs, newsletters and web writers have also recently joined in. Posting in the National Women’s Law Center blog, Outreach Manager Thao Nguyen told the poignant story of hearing from a friend that she’d just married her long-time hesitant boyfriend. The marriage news was good news, but its terms took the joy out: having lost her job, it was the only way she could get health insurance.
Her point seemed so logical, but the entire idea was couched in such an insane reality I was simply speechless. Lucy is in her early 30s but she has a pre-existing condition so buying individual health insurance and the unfair, overpriced premiums that come with it was out of the question. Lucy has been living with Dan for 10 years, but unfortunately, he works for a company that doesn’t offer domestic partner benefits.
I couldn’t help but think: is this what our broken, unstable health care system means for millions of Americans around the country? As the economy continues to struggle, employers continue to shed jobs, and every day 14,000 more Americans wake up realizing that they are now uninsured and just one illness away from financial ruin. Are reluctant bachelors around the country going to put away their Megan Fox posters, cancel the “poker nights” (aka X-Box marathons we’re on to you), and start settling down?
My own run-in with healthcare weirdness is minor in comparison to most, but I still remember the shock. Making a routine call to renew the prescription for a bone-building drug I had taken for years to stave off osteoporosis, the message center person said she probably should warn me that rather than the $24 co-pay I’d been having per quarter my cost would now be $230. I do need these bones, but couldn’t see them worth $920 a year. I hung up and started drinking more milk. Had to get breast cancer, for which I now take a covered post- cancer drug which my oncologist prescribes… mainly to keep my bones healthy. Something is bizarre here.
Or maybe we women might bend the old macho adage a little: It’s broke, fix it.
I cannot imagine how tough that would be, Brian. But good for NYC. The little I do see of people who can’t get medical care because of our broken system is what makes me continue to hope & pray it’ll be fixed. Still a long road ahead.
Try having two serious chronic diseases and being totally out of the private system and see how strange things really get! Luckily I live in NYC and have public options available to me.