Tracy Baker has spent nearly 25 years helping people converse with one another; whether a salesperson of any ilk to a potential client, a customer service representative to a customer, or a manager to an employee. A student of human nature and a curmudgeon-in-training, he has been writing essays under the moniker "The Milkman's Son" for the last 5 years. About them he says:
"Okay, okay. I can finally admit it. I am the milkman’s son. This does not, however, mean I am an unfortunate bastard (contrary to popular belief). My father, you see, was a proud member of this long gone profession. A friend of my parents used to tease my mother, implying all her children where the result of liaisons with the milkman.
"It always brought laughs from the “adults”. I never understood what was so funny. My father was a milkman and I was his child. So? I call this little something-or-other “The Milkman’s Son” because despite my path in life, despite how successful (or not), I am who I am because I am my Father’s child. He died nigh on ten years ago now, yet he still influences most things I do. A plainspoken man from Michigan, he liked to act the curmudgeon. Yet when you paid close attention, you’d find a man who truly cared for people and for life."
These essays are my way of sharing what I see, read, or hear all around me, everyday. And as John Adams, expounding on a quote from Samuel Johnson once said:
Samuel Johnson said ‘When I sat upon my throne in the tavern, I dogmatized and was contradicted, and in this I found delight.’
“My throne is not in a tavern but by my fireplace. There I dogmatize, laugh, and there newspapers sometimes make me scold…and in dogmatizing, laughing and scolding, I find delight. Why should I not enjoy it, since no one is worse for it, and I am the better!”
John Adams, 1805
The Milkman’s Son
By Tracy Baker
A Crisis of Care
Somewhere in the 1980s a sea change occurred within the healthcare industry. HMOs, declared saviors of the healthcare industry at the time, one by one, went from being non-profit, caring mutual associations to for-profit, corporate centers of greed. In the 1990s, those who were not churning out cash for the stockholders fast enough were swallowed up by the ones who were, leaving tens of thousands of insured people scrambling for a replacement, most at higher costs.
Another problem is the many doctor groups who have been playing hardball with the HMOs over reimbursement rates. The HMOs, figuring they have nothing to lose, have been giving as good as they are getting. For example, Stanford Medical Group and Affinity Medical Group dropped my own HMO, PacifiCare, at the end of last year. Both my wife’s and my own doctor belonged to these groups. Affinity settled before the year-end and Winnie was able to retain her doctor. Stanford and PacifiCare failed to reach agreement and I was forced to leave Stanford, a hospital and medical group I had been with since 1979.
One of the most insidious “cash flow improvement projects” involved many HMOs selectively red-lining areas of the country with high Senior Citizen populations, thus eliminating in one fell swoop the high costs of Medicare supplement plans. When I worked in banking, redlining could not only get you fined, but criminally charged, as well as subject to lawsuits galore. Apparently, that is not the case for health insurance as these companies have gone about it with exuberance, essentially telling you that, if you have no other choice in health coverage, we will dictate where you live.
The outcome of all this is that millions of folk, both working and retired, are forced to go without health coverage, placing an unmanageable strain on the inadequate public healthcare systems that exist in this country. Millions of women are forced to drive 30, 60, even 100 miles from their homes to deliver their babies, as hospitals shut down maternity wards deemed unprofitable. People with life-threatening injuries are being turned away from emergency rooms because they have either no insurance or the wrong kind of insurance. Some do not live to tell these tales, and the ones that do are shunted to overburdened city or county-run facilities, bulging with the uninsured.
This tale doesn’t end there.
Your Body…Or Is It?
Shortly before President Clinton left office, his administration adopted a set of rules designed to prevent the disclosure or even sale of your medical records. Sounds like common sense to me. It is my body and I should have the right to decide who sees my records, and when they can see them. Doctors agreed with the provisions of this bill, the public agrees with this bill…but the insurance companies do not.
So, it should come as no surprise that Smirky and friends, the defenders of the corporate way, have changed the rules, dropping the key protection of obtaining a patients permission to release records to other involved parties.
“The changes we are proposing today will allow us to deliver strong protections for personal medical information while improving access to care.” Thus spoke Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he did not say was that those “strong protections” were for the insurance companies’ profits, not your rights.
As with the Reagan Administration’s gutting of OSHA (among other consumer-oriented agencies) in the 1980s, this Reagan-wannabe President has started merrily along that same path, reversing or eliminating anything (especially if it had the Clinton stamp on it) that may stand in the way of corporate profits. Health and Human Services is surely becoming Health and Corporate Services under the Bush Doctrine – “First, Find Out What The Corporations Think Of It…”
The Legacy of Harry and Louise
It didn’t have to be this way. We came oh, so close to getting the National health plan we so desperately need right now. Sure, Hillary made political mistakes in pushing for her plan, but, once again, the real villains were the insurance companies and their Republican cronies in Congress. They spent millions of dollars to demonize the plan as “Socialized Medicine,” something that, according to them, would throw anyone who was sick into a sterile, white-walled institution, and take away all your rights to the best healthcare in the world. Pardon me, but that is simply bullshit.
Texas political columnist Molly Ivins said it best in a recent article:
The most maddening thing about the sheer stupidity of America's health care system is that the far better alternative is perfectly clear. Every other industrialized nation manages to do this better than we do.
The answer is universal health insurance, a single-payer system. Every time we start to get serious about reform, the right wing starts screaming, "Socialized medicine, socialized medicine." And then we're all supposed to run, screaming with horror.
But if you want to see horror in action, try the emergency room of any large public hospital in this country. And for a truly hilarious experience, try to get emergency medical help on Christmas Eve.
Conservatives reflexively start moaning about the cost of a "big, new government program." Actually, what's costly is the system we have now. Americans already spend 58 percent more than the weighted average of similar nations for health care.
Too Late?
Is it too late to fix it? I say no. What we need is a grass roots ground swell. Don’t sit back on your laurels thinking, “Well, I have insurance. I’m fine.” Fine today is not a guarantee of anything in the future. As the costs of healthcare continues to skyrocket, the push for profits will be too great, and the only ones left with any health plan at all will be the wealthy, The President, and Congress.
Fini
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07/24/05