IT'S ALL RELATIVE, politics and religion [guest post by my dad]

Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)

Thanks to my dad for another great guest post. If you would like to read his others posts here at The Sez, check em out:

- Death of a King, RIP Steve Jobs

- Realpolitik for Everyman

- On swear words

And don't forget to check out his blog, Rumpletweezer's World!!

Enjoy!

IT'S ALL RELATIVE

Politics and religion... politics and religion. Topics unfit for discussion among friends. The following is an edited transcript of an email reply to a relative of mine. We differ on a few important things, sad to say. Maybe it's a generational thing...

HOWEVER IMPERFECT, the medical plan President Obama got passed into law and known as the Affordable Care Act is the only one he could get passed.

Remember, he left it to the Congress to try to model a workable plan, one that could pass. He wanted it to be a bi-partisan plan. Obama could not know then that these folks in the honorable opposition did not want even ONE piece of his proposed legislation to be successful, no matter how worthy.

My gripe with the Affordable Care Act is that it doesn't go far enough, but at least it's something.

In BRITAIN... my Dad had a pacemaker installed to correct his arrhythmia... and just a year or two later, an operation and a bowel resection to remove a cancerous tumor. He was in his 80s, mind you. It cost him not a pence, thanks to compassionate doctors and a national single payer health program, enacted by a Parliament sympathetic to working people. Call it post-war guilt, but they made it law.

Dad lived to be nearly 89 and died peacefully in 2000 in a hospice in Cheshire. His certificate of death showed that he had many ailments, ranging from heart disease to cancer. Any one of these would have laid him low in the United States of America long before 2000 without a single-payer insurance plan in place.

Friend of mine fell down some stairs while vacationing in France two years ago. She used to be a high powered marketing executive at a major health insurance company in Philadelphia, but during a heart transplant procedure ten years ago or more, her oxygen supply was compromised and she suffered some brain damage. She has trouble remembering things and has to write down EVERYTHING. She lost her high powered job, of course, and has no insurance. Her meds run $20,000 a year.

Her husband is a house painter... and a damned good one too. He would have to be, to be able to help her get her medications. She has no immune system, thanks to the transplant.

I met her at an Obama organizing event in 2008.

Oh.... And that fall in France? She was hospitalized for a week for observation and had a few brain scans as well. Cost: zero.

Currently, another friend is facing a medical battle, and facing it courageously. No further details here. Suffice it to say that the road is pitted and inclines upward.

We need the ACA.

Huge corporations representing insurance and pharmaceuticals and their lobbyists are far too strong, far too entrenched -- and the voters far too gullible or stupid here, to want or accept anything like the European models that work so well for so many people.

These pinheads get their news and opinions from Rush Limbaugh and Fox. People are told here that the Democrats and the Liberals want to take away their precious individual freedoms.

The Right likes the idea of the "Individual" ... if not the actual individual him- or herself.

You see, people are born one at a time. And they die one at a time. It's a beautiful system from one perspective because nobody much notices -- or even cares -- when one individual person is suffering, or has lost their struggle.

I am mad as hell.