Written by Paul Dail
I have largely stayed away from writing on the topic of health care.
Wait! Don’t go! That’s one of the reasons I haven’t written about it.
Because many people—myself included—see the words “health care” in a headline and for one reason or another, skip right over it. So let me come at you like a friend, to talk about it like we might over a cup of coffee. Or a beer.
Or a 32-oz refill.
Because I have some personal experience with this topic, stemming from when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with kidney cancer. Well, who ever expects cancer, right?
I think that question is worth asking again and remembering.
How many people plan on getting sick? Besides hypochondriacs, that is.
(I actually am something of a hypochondriac, by the way. But if you didn’t already know that from my earlier columns, we’ll save that one for another coffee. Or beer. Or 32-oz refill.)
I got lucky when it came to my kidney cancer, something which only has a 10-15 percent chance of survival if not caught in time. In the biggest sense, I got lucky because my cancer was caught in time. As a result, I survived and got more time with my wife and kids.
But in another pretty big sense, since I was covered by employer health insurance, I only had to pay a fraction of the $35,000 bill. While a hefty tab, this is a pittance really considering they saved my life.
But everything is relative. Paying the $1,000 of our deductible that our Health Savings Account didn’t cover was something I could make happen. If I was one of the estimated 53,000 Utahns working without employer health insurance, making too much for Medicaid but not enough for insurance subsidies, it would be a much different story.
53,000.
That’s a lot of people. To put it in perspective, imagine if more than two-thirds of the population of St. George—your friends and neighbors—didn’t have any health insurance and the prospects for getting any given their financial situation was next to nil.
Then they got cancer.
But I was lucky. Because I wasn’t one of those people.
So before I became a journalist, I skimmed over headlines about the Affordable Care Act (several times, actually, before I realized that was actually the real name of “Obamacare”) and other stuff about health care. Because I didn’t need to know about it. As a result, I was largely uneducated about it.
However, even when I didn’t know all the specific details, in polite conversation with friends—some like-minded, some not so much—I had expressed my belief that we should do our damnedest to help those who have a harder time helping themselves, providing it doesn’t put us in the poor house ourselves.
When I heard that my aforementioned employer-funded Health Savings Account would potentially be taxed heavier as a result of the Affordable Care Act, I was okay with that. I counted myself pretty fortunate to have it in the first place.
Then I started covering news for The Independent and learning a little more, and not just about the Affordable Care Act but also about Gov. Gary Herbert’s Healthy Utah Plan, an alternative to the Medicaid expansion suggested by the ACA. The more I learned, the more I wondered (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing).
Healthy Utah was a plan passed by the Senate and supported by at least 54 percent of Utah voters (with an additional 23 percent favoring Medicaid expansion in general), but the Utah House of Representatives was refusing to even let the bill out of the House Rules Committee and open it up for public comment. What was going on here?
While I’m glad to see that the House got past their stubborn refusal to even let Herbert’s Healthy Utah Plan out of the House Rules Committee (I’d like to think it was the result of public pressure, incited in some small part by my news piece on the topic), the fact that the House Business and Labor Committee still proceeded to vote it down on Wednesday and keep it from going in front of the full House, after all but two Utah residents at the committee meeting spoke in favor of the bill, says something else is going on.
I don’t claim to know how the government really works. I know it’s more than just elected officials acting on behalf of the people. I don’t think we see a smidgeon of what is going on behind closed doors, but even in the wide open, you can see the games, such as Gov. Herbert apparently holding the Draper prison relocation hostage as pressure on House Speaker Greg Hughes (who is from Draper).
So I’m sure there’s much more going on behind the scenes when it comes to decisions like these besides what is actually the will of the people being represented, but I’ll leave the conspiracy theories to the creators of the political drama “House of Cards” (which won’t make you feel better about government, by the way).
And I said I was going to come at you like a friend on this topic, right? There are other issues, like the debate over costs and what would have happened when Healthy Utah hit the end of the two-year proposed “pilot” time frame, but I’m trying to talk to you as a regular person (although I’ll talk about that other stuff with you in the comments if you’d like).
Here’s what bothers me as a regular person. When referring to his proposed alternate legislation, Rep. Jim Dunnigan was quoted in KSL News as describing his plan as a “Yugo, but it still drives.” Seriously? He’s making a joke about his legislation which would only offer Medicaid expansion to approximately one-third of the people who need it? I’d invite Dunnigan to go find that other two-thirds and make the same joke.
While we’re at it, there are still House representatives saying they would rather do nothing at all to help these 53,000 Utahns. The sponsor of Healthy Utah in the Senate said the bill should’ve gone in front of the whole House so that those members would have to stand and be counted. And maybe more than that, they should have to go on the publicity tour with Dunnigan.
Again, I’ll admit to being relatively ignorant of all these issues in the past because I wasn’t “one of those people,” but perhaps it’s time to realize that just because we’re not of them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about what happens to them.
This shouldn’t be a game; this should be an issue that rises above politics-as-usual. This is about people’s lives. To get back to my earlier point, not many people choose to get sick, but these representatives are willing to gamble with people’s health in a game of roulette where the winners could get a nod from their party and the losers could be financially ruined.
Or dead.
Paul D. Dail received his BFA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from the University of Montana, Missoula. In addition to freelance journalism and web content creation, he also enjoys writing creative nonfiction and fiction (with a penchant for the darker side of the page). His collection of flash fiction, “Free Five,” has spent over a year and a half in the top 50 Kindle Horror Shorts Stories since its publication in 2012. Currently he lives on the outskirts of Kanarraville, surrounded by the sagebrush and pinyon junipers, with his wife and two children. Read more about Paul at www.pauldail.com. While he prefers that any comments directed at a specific article be posted in a public forum, he welcomes all other correspondence at [email protected]
