An editorial
May 3, 2003
Madison’s Social Justice Center last week honored an incredibly dedicated Dane County couple – Eugene and Linda Farley – for their tireless devotion to improving health care, especially for those who can least afford it in our nonsensical and brutally unfair health insurance system.
The two doctors have spent their retirement years not only advocating for a national universal health care system, but endlessly volunteering to help the hundreds of families right here in Dane County who have no insurance to pay medical bills, a reality that’s nothing short of tragic in this, the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
If the country’s collective eyes are ever going to be opened to the need for true health care reform, it will be because of people like the Farleys, who refuse to give up a fight for what they know is right.
Eugene and Linda Farley know firsthand what the lack of health care coverage does to families. Because they voluntarily treat folks at the community health center and at the Salvation Army, they know how children from uninsured families go without care for their eyes, for their teeth and for those nagging infections that in the end make it more difficult for them to cope not only in later life, but today in school.
The Farleys know that most of these families are not the stereotypical laggards of society, but working people whose employers cannot afford to provide them with health benefits.
They know that those employers are increasing each year as insurance premiums take another double-digit jump because the cost of everything from a visit to the doctor to the bill at the pharmacy is beyond control.
And they know that we’re wasting so much money – on convoluted insurance plans, costly administrative procedures at practically every step in our current system, and inane pricing policies for medicines – that we could easily afford a national single-payer system that would cover every American with what we’re spending on health care now.
More than 40 million Americans go without health care coverage every single day of the year. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 18,000 of those people die prematurely every year because they put off seeing a doctor and getting care simply because they don’t want to burden their families with bills they can’t afford to pay.
Why do we refuse to change the system?
Because special interests – from pharmaceutical companies to insurance conglomerates – have bought and paid for legislators and members of Congress to keep the system the way it is. Meanwhile, prices have spiraled so far out of control that working Americans, when they do have insurance, forgo pay raises just to keep health coverage. And the ranks of the uninsured keep on growing.
It’s time that we start listening to the likes of the Farleys. They have no financial interest in the outcome, only an interest in helping working people and their children get the health care that as Americans they not only deserve, but should be their right.
The system can be changed if, like Drs. Eugene and Linda Farley, we refuse to give up the fight.
The views in this space are provided by The Capital Times, Wisconsin’s progressive daily newspaper.
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