DICKENS WOULD HAVE A HEYDAY IN THESE HEALTH CARE TIMES
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity …”
Sound familiar?
It should. What’s more, the Dickensian view that opens the first sentence of “Tale of Two Cities” ends sounding even more like the current time of Donald Trump and a Republican party — an administration that cannot seem to summon empathy for anyone save themselves.
“… [I]n short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
This seems especially true of the GOP’s struggle to find an America that can simply go without pesky health care — or at least without the cost for it.
Enter Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., who swept into Congress on the tea party wave in 2010 calling for fiscal austerity and now is chairwoman of the House Budget Committee. She also is a 2018 Republican candidate for governor in Tennessee.
Black on Friday told MSNBC host Chuck Todd that if she had her way, hospital emergency rooms would be able to turn patients away to help keep health care costs down.
“I’m an emergency room nurse,” Black said. “There are people that came into my emergency room that I, the nurse, was the first one to see them. I could have sent them to a walk-in clinic or their doctor the next day, but because of a law that Congress put into place to say, no, I have to treat everybody that walks into that emergency room.”
That law wasn’t the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare.
Noooo. It was the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act which was signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan. It was a congressional response to stories of “patient dumping,” a term applyied to a practice of hospitals denying treatment to patients or sending them elsewhere — usually because the patients didn’t have insurance. Those patients often were jobless or people of color.
The law put a particular focus on pregnant women (hence “active labor” in the law’s name), according to the Huffington Post, “to ensure that they would be able to deliver their babies and receive full care.”
Black contends that people in the ER “for a sore throat they’ve had a week” shouldn’t be in that ER setting, and she has a point. But as access to routine health care is narrowed by political actions, one patient’s ordinary sore throat is another’s strep that leads to rheumatic fever and worse.
Black told Todd she would roll back not only Obamacare (she voted to do so many times) but the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, as well.
At this new worst of times — when the GOP is looking to do anything and everything it can to sabotage reasonable coverage such as allowing states to allow insurers to again turn away people with expensive preexisting conditions — we seem headed down a bleak, Dickensian path.
Black and many others in the GOP would return us to a time when health care is simply not available, not only for our most vulnerable citizens, but for much of our middle class, as well.
It would seem if anyone should understand this, it would an ER nurse.
Even one such as Black, with an estimated net worth of $75.3 million in 2015, ranking her as the 8th most wealthy House member, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Apparently for her, it’s the best of times.