Sensing Something Wrong

When I was a young woman I worked the night shift for a couple of years.  Then I switched to the day shift, and after a couple weeks transition I was amazed one day to realize how good I felt.  I had so much energy and such a sense of well-being compared to a few weeks earlier, I was finding it hard to believe I had once taken feeling bad for granted.  Sometimes you feel so bad for so long you don’t realize how sick you are.  Our society is like that.  We are living thoroughly unhealthy lives in every area of life.  Our dietary habits are unhealthy.  Our sleep habits are unhealthy.  Our minds are full of disturbing junk.  Our relationships are unsatisfactory and sometimes on life support.  We lack nourishing family and community.  Our spirits are so parched we’re crying out.  Yet we’ve come to accept all of this as “just the way it is.”  We aren’t what we were made for nor enjoying what we were meant to be.  God save us.

Whose Needs

Whenever we hear the case for a government program, we hear sad stories of individuals in distress.  The argument goes that a new government program would be the answer to the person’s problems.  In reality though, there never is a program or a system that fits everyone.  There are always exceptions.  The other reality is that in a country where the government has a program for nearly every problem, the individual hard cases are still hard cases.  They are hard on the program, on the government and on the taxpayers.  Therefore in some European countries, caregivers are being taught they have a responsibility to the society as a whole that is greater than their responsibility to their patient or client.  This really sets professions on their ears when their very reason for existence is healing and helping.  Its creating an identity crisis of mammoth proportions when the healers are told that healing may not be in society’s best interests.  The great irony is that individual hard cases which supposedly justified massive governmental intervention have been the same cases that governments now don’t want to treat, pleading hardship to the society.  There will always be a conflict between individual needs and societal needs.  You can’t balance on the knife edge between them.  It always requires facing up to the society’s ultimate values: the sacred value of each individual life, or the sacred value of the society not to overstretch its economy.

Loving to be Happy

If you want to be happy, indeed if you really want to live life to the fullest, you have to love, love, love.  Dr. Smiley Blanton once said “Love or perish”.  We have to love God, love our neighbors, and love ourselves.  Everyone is familiar with the saying of Jesus that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.  What people aren’t familiar with are the last words of this quote.  The last words are “do this and you will live.”   If we love God, we will grow closer to Him.  As we do that, we begin to realize how much He loves us.  That gives us the confidence and esteem to be able to love ourselves.  As we provide for our legitimate needs, we fill our internal well to be able to give love to others.  All this love coming around through God, us and others and around again is the source of life.  This love is like water to a thirsty plant, like rain to the desert, like sunshine in a dark and dreary place.  Just as we would say our well watered plants are “growing happily”, our well watered souls are growing happily too.  And we are living, really living.

What Socialism Does to Hospitals

In all the healthcare debates, my prayer is that whatever we end up with, we will have something that glorifies God in our treatment of His children.  All humans need to be treated with respect as God’s much loved children.  They need kindness, dignity, compassion, and to be served with excellence.  In America I have volunteered and worked in several nonprofit hospitals.  Most of them were faith based organizations.  I saw a lot of people get first rate, compassionate care, and I know they never paid a cent for their care.  Thats how non-profit hospitals work.  They charge for the care they provide, but at the end of the day those who have no insurance or inadequate insurance end up paying according to what they can afford.  Many times that is nothing.  The hospitals write off the difference as part of their non-profit status.  What keeps them in business is the full pay patients who either have “good” insurance or pay a portion of their bills themselves because they can afford to do so.  What is likely to happen if we have a single payer system like England had for years, is these hospitals will be driven out of business and taken over by the government.  If they are government run, everything will be done with cost savings in mind.  And thats what is wrong with socialized healthcare, such as I lived with for years.  The care given is the minimum mandated by the national government.  The care is not based on values of love, compassion, kindness, dignity and respect, but on budgets and mandates. 

In this country some non-profit healthcare institutions rely on large donations for some of their revenue.   In a socialized system, the high, high taxes leave much less left over for donation.  After having more than half one’s income paid out in taxes, people tend to be in a less generous mood, even if they can still afford some additional generosity.  And lastly, since things are run by a government bureaucracy, its all about the good of the masses, not the good of the individual.  Read about the debates in England right now.  Doctors are being encouraged to consider first the good of society over the good of their patients.

Whereas some insurance companies treat people like statistics, at least the hospitals have maintained the ability to be more personal.  A good bit of that is lost if the hospital is a government hospital.  There is always a lot more mandate than money, and the stresses on the hospital show in the treatment of patients.  So, whatever the United States decides it wants to do, my prayer is the outcome will be something pleasing to our Heavenly Father, who is so concerned for persons, He knows the number of hairs on our heads and every tear we shed.  May we as a society be compassionate and kind, not a further coarsened culture.

A Prayer About Healthcare

Lord, we know you are in control, and you influence kings and governors for your purposes.  We approach you at this significant time in our nation’s history and ask you to impress your thoughts on our congress as they make decisions about healthcare reform.  Open the eyes of our lawmakers to writings of our forefathers.  Let them consider the things that made this country great.  Please let their decisions be compassionate, let them honor and dignify all human life, let them give dignity to all persons and let them honor our human rights.  Don’t allow them to make government so strong over us that it becomes our god, for whenever government has taken the place of God, it has always become a cruel tyranny.

Did Sarah Palin “make up” the part about death panels?

I just read the blog about  “Dean” saying Sarah Palin “made up” the fear of “death panels” for her son Trig.  I also just googled “Ezekiel Emanuel”.  He is the brother of Rahm Emanuel the president’s chief of staff, he is a bioethicist at the NIH, and he is on the whitehouse staff as an advisor for healthcare reform.  While he states he does not support state assisted suicide, he does consider mental abilities when deciding who should get healthcare.  He does support withholding healthcare for people with mental disabilities.  This is not “made up”.  It was just there in black and white.  However, I would suppose by now the whitehouse has managed to pull down every website about Ezekiel Emanuel I just read.  Look anyway.  They might have missed something.

Health Care Retort

I am just amazed at the media feeding frenzy over the health care town hall meetings.  People ARE angry.  But instead of analyzing why people might be angry, as the media usually analyzes the “why” of everything, they are in lockstep with insulting the people who are protesting.  Can you imagine the media insulting people who protested the war in Iraq, or anything else?

 

I think people at these meetings are afraid, because in the past,  the president has favored a single payer system similar to the NHS in England. Perhaps these bills aren’t yet a single payer system, but will possibly be leading to one if the private sector has to support yet more government underfunding and it bankrupts them. Our local hospitals are today in serious financial crisis because of medicare and medicaid cuts. They keep seeing patients, but are running out of funds to make up the difference between what the government pays and what it costs to treat these patients.

I lived with the NHS for six years, and could tell first person stories of what I saw and experienced in our local community. Yes, care is much more scarce and of lower quality. Taxes are much higher. Eventually, a two-tiered system developed because the NHS basically broke down. Its on the verge of breakdown again. It is this kind of a system people fear.

 

Instead of looking at these issues, the media is labeling and insulting the protesters.  Its a media retort instead of a report

Is Patient Visitation Grounds for Gay Marriage?

Leonard Pitts wrote a heart-wrenching article about how a Lesbian woman wasn’t allowed to see her dying partner. He made a case for their being an outstanding couple and how “gay hatred” is at fault here. The woman had a medical power of attorney for the patient and the hospital had a concern for the patient’s privacy rights. I researched the case at length and although it is presented as a gay rights case, this really isn’t a case about gay rights. Anyone who holds the power of attorney for medical care should have the right to see the person at issue. Otherwise how can they make the legal decisions regarding care they have been empowered to make? Since the hospital erred in this case, they should be sued in my opinion. Establishing gay marriage nationwide still wouldn’t solve the issue of friends who hold powers of attorney for medical care for each other. This is a very, very common practice in the community, especially in this day and age when families often live far from one another. Particularly in the senior community, you have friends giving medical power of attorney to one another, and in these cases, the person holding the power of attorney has a right to see the patient and a right to the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions. This is an issue that is more far-reaching and common than gay partnerships, and “gay marriage” wouldn’t solve it for the vast majority of people affected by it.

Getting Sick in Europe

One wonderful thing about getting older is I get to write about history that I actually saw and experienced.  As I look at our country, the United States, rushing in certain directions, I am both amazed and amused to find such ignorance of lessons already learned.

In the rush to “universal healthcare”, including the new federal electronic surveillance of medical records, we are truly seeing “change” of a magnitude Americans have never before experienced.  I know where we are going, both as a national economy and as a nationalized health system.  Within a few years we will be where Britain was in the 1980s.  I actually lived in Britain in the 1980s, and while I could quote lots of statistics, they are available other places online.  Because I lived it, I can tell you stories of what the reality looked like.

My first experience was touring the local hospital on a public information day.  We toured the Obstetrics unit, and as the ward sister (nurse) enthusiastically spoke of mothers being able to labor on the floor if they wished, I looked at the floor.  It looked as if it had not been mopped in weeks.  It was literally muddy.  Next came the emergency room.  It wasn’t full, with an overflowing waiting room, which I found interesting.  Later on I would learn why it was so relatively quiet.

I made friends with an elderly neighbor.  She had cataracts, and could barely get around.  I decided to help her with her grocery shopping.  Turns out she was on a two year waiting list for cataract surgery.  Once her cataracts became “ripe”,she went on the list.  Trouble is, she was quite blind before her name came up.  After her first cataract surgery was complete, she waited another two years to have the second eye done.  She eventually found a lump in her breast.  She was put on a list to see a surgeon and waited several months for an appointment.  She eventually had a radical mastectomy, but died of her cancer shortly afterward.  I will never know whether seeing the surgeon earlier would have made a difference, but the attitude of her caregivers was she was elderly and had a good life, so what.

I lived across from a children’s playground.  One day a child fell out of the equipment and obviously had a broken arm.  She was in shock and vomiting from the pain.  I convinced her mother to take her to the local emergency room, where they waited all night without being seen.  In the morning they were scolded for coming, and told to go to their g.p. (general practitioner).   Having lived in America, I thought it was unconscionable to let a child suffer in pain that long unattended, but this was how it was done.

A friend was in a motor vehicle accident and it was thought he had a fractured cervical vertebra.  They kept him on a gurney, and put on a cervical collar, but he was unattended for 24 hours–just lying in the hall, not being treated.  After 24 hours with no fluids, no food, and in pain, he convulsed and eventually died.

Another friend, in his 50s, had a heart attack and died in that same emergency room.  He had never had blood pressure medication or statins, although that kind of medication was already standard in t he U.S.  I actually heard a physician say it was a waste to give such medication just to prolong life a couple of years and have a person become senile instead of just dying.

So, look out when the government becomes your doctor.  You had better have good genes, good luck and good knowledge of whatever alternative care you can find for yourself. 

Britain now has a two-tiered health system.  The national health service couldn’t take care of everybody, so working people finally had the option of a system similar to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and many are now using it.  Remember that the “Hilary Healthcare Plan” wasn’t going to give us that option.  A “single payer system” doesn’t have any other options.

Dear President Obama

Dear President Obama,

 

I was deeply disappointed that you would lift the ban on funding overseas abortions.  I wish you would study what really happens during an abortion.  It is so grievously sad and tragic as well as cruel, what really happens.  I have personally seen abortions and aborted fetuses, and it totally changed my mind.  We can talk about “choice” all we want, but there are all kinds of choices, and people make the most horrendous choices every day.  God has given you so much power to do good.  Please think, pray and reconsider.

Nonni