North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

August 20, 2009

Compassion: You Can’t Afford It

She lay, bleary eyed, on a bench near the river in Detroit’s Hart Plaza on a beautiful but cool June morning: African-American, in her early 50s, clad in a mismatched array of thrift-store grade clothes. As I walked by, she raised her head, turned on her side, and vomited a pool of bright red blood onto the concrete. Seemingly exhausted by this effort, she flopped back onto the bench, eyes closed.

Notified of her condition, an irritated policeman meandered over to the bench. A few moments later, an ambulance arrived to transport this woman to Receiving Hospital. Apart from the pool of bloody vomit, Hart Plaza was once again cleansed of her presence, or any other reminder that it was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of human beings in circumstances of dire need.

One can only learn so many details of another’s life by watching them vomit blood in public, but a few things seem reasonably certain: This woman had no health insurance, and chances are, she is no longer around to take sides in the current public debate over health care reform. Instead, she likely joined an estimated 17,999 other individuals who die annually in the United States from preventable or curable diseases simply because they do not have or cannot afford health care coverage.

The London Independent’s Johann Hari points out that 18,000 preventable deaths per year is the equivalent of six 9/11s annually, a casualty rate repeated year in and year out. The U.S. was rightly enraged by this now-mythic transformative event, and Americans gladly committed trillions of dollars in efforts – however misguided – to prevent its recurrence through exercise of military force. For some reason, however, when afforded the opportunity to prevent a far greater number of deaths year in and year out at far lower cost, America balks.

One can only infer that as a people, we really don’t give a damn about the safety or suffering of our fellow citizens. Given the chance to actively save lives, we turn up our noses on specious philosophical or political grounds, gladly sacrificing 18,000 human beings per year on the altar of corporate freedom, marginally lower taxation or political party affiliation. We’ll spend $30,000 for a single helicopter-mounted missile to take out a wedding party in Afghanistan or $2.1 million for a pilotless drone bomb, but not a dime to tend to the hundreds of thousands of returned veterans of such conflicts who now live and die in alleyways and under bridges from sea to shining sea alongside their similarly unfortunate civilian counterparts.

And damnit, we’ll show up to scream and rant at townhall meetings in order to defend the moral rectitude of our position.

For hundreds of thousands of citizens a year, our current health care system – if it can even be called that – is the mechanism by which American dreams become American nightmares. For the lucky ones, the nightmare leads to foreclosure or bankruptcy court. For 18,000 less fortunate, it means death. And at some point, it must cross most of their minds that their fortunes, their lives could have been readily salvaged if only their fellow citizens had cared enough.

Nobody knows what passed through the mind of the blood-vomiting woman in Hart Plaza that June morning. Perhaps she thought to herself that this would be one of the last few bright summer days she would have the opportunity to experience on this Earth. Just maybe, in between spasms of pain, she looked across the narrow expanse of the Detroit River at Canada, and thought to herself that if only she lived there she could have seen a doctor and possibly reclaimed her health – there being a country where her fellow citizens cared at least enough to provide a mechanism for her care, a civilized place where even the most downtrodden were considered deserving of humane treatment. A place which, seen from the vantage point of 2009 America, is so close yet so very far away.

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