I went to two health care rallies. One of them was at the Denver office of Senator Michael Bennet, and the other one was at the office of my other Senator, Mark Udall.
There, I met the family of Zumante Lucero.
Zumante was a young kid, who was nine years old. His family's poor, and for a while, they were on Medicaid. Then, something happened, some sort of paperwork error with Medicaid, and their benefits were terminated. They made repeated calls, office visits, and talked to multiple people trying to get Zumante's benefits restored, so he could have medical care. Unfortunately, he didn't get medical care, with tragic results.
Zumante had a serious case of asthma. When his family was on Medicaid, he could get visits to the doctor, and prescriptions of Cingulair and other medications to control his asthma. After they were cut off from Medicaid, Zumante couldn't get his asthma medications.
A few days ago, Zumante had a severe asthma attack. He was rushed to the hospital, but at that point, he'd stopped breathing, and his heart stopped. Doctors resuscitated him, but his heart had been stopped for fifteen minutes, and at that point, his brain was severely damaged. He would never be able to breathe on his own again, or eat, or regain consciousness.
On Monday, Zumante Lucero died.
His family, especially his mother, was clearly still reeling from his death. They, and I were shedding plenty of tears. And we all made sure that the staffers for Senators Bennet and Udall know Zumante's story and how urgently health care reform is needed in this country.
Zumante is merely the latest addition to the price of our health care system. Another dead child is on the books, as is hundreds of thousands of dollars of hospital bills to pay for all the doctors and nurses that tried to save Zumante's life, as well as the life support and other treatments and diagnostics, which will end up on the taxpayer's dime, because there's no way that the Luceros could pay those bills. All because our society was too cheap to give Zumante a visit to the doctor's office and a few pills.
We've got to keep going on health care reform. The Republicans are gleeful after Reid's cave yesterday, but the truth is that rumors of the death of health care reform have been greatly exaggerated.
I'll say it again. Health care reform is far from dead, and we're about to counterpunch HARD!
The Democrats planned for this. They knew that the fight would go past the August recess. Of course, the GOP and the insurance monsters are going on their August death march, but they have no guarantee of success. To quote President Obama, "I'm from Chicago. I don't break." Henry Waxman has threatened to let the House bypass the Commerce and Energy committees, and it seems like the Blue Cross Democrats there are about to cave. (UPDATE, as of now, Henry Waxman and the Blue Dogs have reached some sort of agreement, and markup for HR 3200 in the Energy & Commerce Committee is set to resume!) Nancy Pelosi says the votes are there to pass HR 3200. And they'll likely do it before the August recess.
At that point, all we have to do is keep our activism up, keep shining sunlight on characters such as Blue Cross Baucus, and eventually, they will be forced to cave.
So keep reccing slinkerwink's and nyceve's diaries! Keep making those phone calls, canvassing, signing petitions and showing the legislative process to the world so the bad actors in Congress are forced to clean up their act. We must keep fighting to the end.
For Zumante.
UPDATE: I corrected a few details of Zumante's story that I got wrong, and I found a link to a story by KDVR about Zumante Lucero:
http://www.kdvr.com/...