Excuse me while I weave this diatribe together. For I will touch upon several themes that disturb me with the current crop of neo-conservative, theocratic right wing idealogues of the Republican type. In my discussion, I'll refer to this nefarious group simply as 'Grand Old Poopers' or GOPer for short.
My story begins with a small personal piece of evidence you should know to understand how the rest unfolds. Simply put, my wife and I are unable to have natural born children. Our solution was simple enough. Foster parenting.
How this leads into health care, family values, etc. You will see quite soon.
Excuse me while I weave this diatribe together. For I will touch upon several themes that disturb me with the current crop of neo-conservative, theocratic right wing idealogues of the Republican type.
My story begins with a small personal piece of evidence you should know to understand how the rest unfolds. Simply put, my wife and I are unable to have natural born children. Our solution was simple enough. Foster parenting.
How this leads into health care, family values, etc. You will see quite soon.
To become a foster parent, we extended several months of training through a local program called PRIDE. For 8 Saturdays we went to class, studied about the kids that would possibly come into our care. How to meet their needs emotionaly, physical, and yes to support their spiritual needs if required.
Though probably not typical, we spent several thousand dollars out of our own pockets making sure our house was safe and met code. This included inspections from a fire marshall, an electrician, a plumber, and hvac specialist. You can imagine the last 3 inspectors roughly found several hundred dollars of work that had to be done to be provided documentation we could provide to the state. In some case, I agreed with the inspectors, in others I wondered if they simply were not taking advantage of the situation and myself. We cheerfully went into our savings to pay for these inconveniences.
My wife and I our not rich. I would consider us lower middle class at best and sometimes barely hanging in there during months of extreme heating and/or cooling costs associated with the weather. We don't really make enough money a month to have an adequate savings plan for our future. We get buy, we pay our bills, we're not rich.
In the past, I've let minor medical issues go by because I simply can't afford to get them fixed. I have a genetic condition that requires drugs. I often undertake those drugs to make them last longer to at least get some benefit. My condition can be controlled to some extent to diet and I work that angle as much as possible.
I wanted you, the casual reader, to understand were probably a lot like a lot of you.
I'm stating all of these facts up front so you'll understand who we are and what were about. We're in this program to help these kids. What is important to understand along the way is how the system works and why I think the system has failed all of us along the way. I will also get to the point where I point out possible solutions and I will outline how I think are friends on the right betray these solutions and undermine our society. As a result of their tactics and policies, we all suffer.
We suffer from higher taxes to support these programs. We suffer when children are bounced from home to home and fall behind in their education, mental development. We suffer when families are torn apart from forces that they not only don't see but can't even begin to comprehend until they are exhausted and beaten down.
One of the interesting arguments I see posted by the GOPers quite often is the basic, 'there is no guarantee for health care. If you get cancer or a serious health element, why should the rest of us pick up the tab.' I'll return to this narrow viewpoint later.
After nearly a year, we were finally awarded two children. I will not post any information about these children to protect their privacy and information ( and myself from snooping officials who might take offense to what I've written here. )
Shortly after receiving these children, one of the children was given to us with an immediate need for medical assistance. Though not of the nature that required an emergency room visit, the problem was serious enough that the child would require significant medical work due to neglect from the former parent, perhaps bad genes and/or
a mixture of environment and genetics.
Here upon is where the travesty of the system begins to break down. For nearly two weeks we struggled with our states CPS services to just get 'temporary' medicaid cards for these children. We're still in the process of working
on getting permanent cards for these kids. We're in a dilemma because we can't add them to our insurance. These issues are beyond our means to fix financially at this time. Nor is there a program that we can determine at a state level to finance these problems and seek at least partial reimbursment from the state. Essentially, we're either going to go into the poor house fixing these problems ourselves or wait until the State CPS offices gets us the medical information to begin to have these kids covered under some kind of medical care. Trust me, my wife and I have spent several hours on the phone with several local and state agencies to get these issues resolved.
Dealing with the government can be quite exasperating.
I would have thought that the issue relating to these children would be a priority in the case workers handling these kids; however, I suspect due to their work load, poor morale, lack of adequate resources to even negotiate their own internal goverment bureaucracy, this is the best support we're going to get from them. I can tell you that if many of these goverment agencies had to fend for themselve in the private sector, they would be out of business and rather quickly. Customer service is terrible. Performance in some cases, is abysmal.
One of the comments I made to someone is I'm not sure who is worse here. The neglectful parents or the state. Pick your poison on this one.
During the meantime, we went about trying to find a medical professional for the children. While I don't live in an affluent area of my city, it could be considered solid middle class.
I first contacted my medical practioner. When I discussed these kids were foster kids and covered by the state, my practitioner's receptionist just about acted like she didn't even want to talk to me. She then made an excuse that the doctor was going out of town for 3 weeks. Disgusted, I hung up the phone. I'll be finding a new practitioner for my needs by the way.
After calling nearly every practitioner within a 10 mile radius, I found out none of them would accept the state insurance for these kids. I was flabbergasted at how difficult the task is to find practitioners in my area that will accept the state insurance. To some I mentioned at least getting them in for a checkup and to see what we were up against. Guess what, more often than not the receptionist tried to push me to other clinics that in some cases were well over 20 miles from my location and/or located in parts of town I wouldn't be caught dead in even during the day.
We finally found a clinic about an hour away from us and gather temporary information to proceed and get these kids problems addressed.
Lesson learned, our medical establishment will bend over backwards for you if you have insurance or money. If not, good luck. Your on your own.
Along the way, we had our first meeting with the mother.
Her crimes were not terrible. She wasn't abusing the kids. In fact, I'm sure she loved her kids. Her issues were primarily poverty, lack of adequate daycare and obviously health care. Her 1st husband was in jail and her second husband was apparently not much of a wage earner or not around. Her primary issue was child abandoment.
From what I could determine, she was living in those motels/hotels the poor often live in because they can't afford an apartment. Often she would leave her kids with relatives or friends for days on end. One thing the Lord did bless her with was the ability to have kids.
I'm not saying she is an angel. Perhaps she might have been mixed up with some rough people. Perhaps even drugs were involved. I don't know all of her details, but I can tell from her story the kind of environment she must operate in and the issues she faces raising several kids on her own on low income jobs. I can only begin to imagine the trials and travesties she walks on a daily basis.
I can say any of us that have been their intuitively know the problems she must face with several kids and trying to make a living, keep a roof over their head, and provide medical needs for them. You can probably guess from this story, the last requirements were not being met because of the type of health system we have and the one I described.
However, let's discuss family values, the poor, our society in general and this is where I'll make my salient points.
- Lack of universal health care. Because of this one glaring problem, these children have been neglected. No adequate immmunizations, lack of affordable dental/medical care.
When I hear that nonsense about people are not guaranteed health care, I want to get in their face and ask them, 'Just what in the heck did these children do?' Are they to blame for anything other than the parents inability to earn sufficient income to pay for probably the most expensive health care system in the world.
- What happened to the old days when medical practitioners set aside a certain percentage of their services for the poor and indigent? Shame on the doctors/dental community in this respect. Is that just some glorious idea I had filled in my head as a kid. Or did that go by the wayside when greed took over the health industry?
- Regarding this mother. Her 1st husband was in jail for a crime I can't mention. However, she was not involved in this matter, but as a result she fell through the cracks.
So I think to myself, all this women needs is access to affordable or free daycare while she looks for a suitable job or works a suitable job or receives job training. She could probably use some assistance for housing, food, medical care. I think about the money that is being spent by the state covering these kids needs and the stipend I receive and wonder, would that have made a difference and kept these kids and their family together.
- These children came to us with a significant spiritual experience. They prayed before eating. They were mindful. They knew who Jesus Christ is and have a vague idea of what he means as a Savior and diety. So I wonder, it seems like the mother was involved in some manner or mechanism with a church or religious institution.
Now I'm not the type to attend church anymore. Let's just say, I have issues with the way many churches are run and administered. I can't help but look at some of these mega-churches and wonder if they truly forgot what the forest looked like while they were dressing up one tree. Excuse me for using a poor metaphor here, but I think you can understand what I am lamenting about many modern religious institutions in this country that seem more material minded than spiritualy minded.
So I wonder, where were the religious institutions at in helping this women meet her needs. Wasn't a large part of the current administrations plan was to make it easier for religious institutions to offer assistance to the poor and needy.
Or were they too busy building those huge mega churches in some cases to consider themselves with the little details of faith. She was obviously taking these
kids to church. Surely someone at that institution may have been able to get involved in her life and offer some assistance.
Don't get me wrong. We love and care for the children in our care. We're helping them work through these problems in their young lives and helping them adjust to what to them must be a surreal experience. But along the way, I can't help but wonder if this lip service about Family Values, Health care and other issues the Religious right want to gloss over us just really are not working well in America and just why that is so.
To often we want to blame the individual for their failings. Their 'sins' so to speak. From what I can tell, the real issue here is economics. As a result of these issues, the state is forced to step in and address the problems this mother had. Yet, the state government is, in and of itself, heavy handed and inefficient at solving these problems. No one is winning here. We're all losing.
Irregardless if these issue could be placed soley on the parent here, it's obvious that for a lot of people, if they just had a few things in their life that supported them, the rest of us as taxpayers would not be picking up the tab or spending tax dollars fixing these issues.
In essence, to borrow a badly overused pun that fits the issues here, 'We're robbing Peter to pay Paul.'
Certainly you can tell from my little microcosmic experience at watching several systems fail so badly that something really is amiss in America with our values and our government.
The time for rhetoric is over. I'll be following up my diatribe with my local and state officials anonymously. For that is the other aspect of the crowd on the 'right side of the bleachers' I find disturbing. If you point out their weaknesses, they attack you. Never do they stop to think that the policies they wish to impose on everyone of us just may not be working or even be reasonable.
For the sakes of all of our children, we better figure these problems out and begin to solve them.
Vote in 2006. Changes begins at the ballot box. See you there.