Senator Mary Landrieu declined to attend.
Countdown producer bears witness to America's health care shortcomings
MSNBC
updated 7:39 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov . 16, 2009
Rich Stockwell
Senior producer, 'Countdown'
New Orleans, La. — - It happened as I watched a 50-something woman walk out, after spending several hours being attended to by volunteer doctors. "She's decided against treatment. A reasonable decision under the circumstances," the doctor tells us as she heads for the next patient. The president of the board of the National Association of Free Health Clinics tells me why: "It's stage four breast cancer, her body is filled with tumors." I don't know when that woman last saw a doctor. But I do know that if she had health insurance, the odds she would have seen a doctor long ago are much higher, and her chances for an earlier diagnosis and treatment would have been far greater.
After watching for hours as the patients moved through the clinic, it was hard to believe that I was in America.
Eighty-three percent of the patients they see are employed, they are not accepting other government help on a large scale, not "welfare queens" as some would like to have us believe. They are tax-paying, good, upstanding citizens who are trying to make it and give their kids a better life just like you and me.
Ninety percent of the patients who came through Saturday's clinic had two or more diagnoses.
Eighty-two percent had a life-threatening condition such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or hypertension. They are victims of a system built with corporate profits at its center, which long ago forgot the moral imperative that should drive us to show compassion to our fellow men and women.
Health reform is not about Democrats or Republicans or who can score political points for the next election, it's about people. It's about fairness and justice in a system that knows none. I'd defy even the most hardened capitalist-loving-conservative to do what I did on Saturday and continue to pretend that the system in place right now is working.
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Stockwell concludes with the question:
I am left with one overwhelming question: what does it say about us as a nation of people who can live in a country so rich and yet allow this to continue?
The answer, if you ask me, is that we have deprivators walking among us and we haven't identified them or decided to stop them. Satan, in the Garden of Eden, was the first. We did not recognize the nature of his act because we were focused on his victims and their response. Just as the author of this essay continues to do.
Some people may consider doing nothing as, at worst, a matter of negligence. That's not an acceptable explanation for someone who's taken an oath to be directed by the Constitution. Public servants have an obligation to perform. Failing to provide for the health and welfare of the public is an act of deprivation just as surely as was the torture of detainees on Guantanamo and turning away those fleeing the floodwaters of New Orleans under color of law, at the point of a gun.
We have a long history of deprivation under color of law. It's what made hereditary servitude a unique institution. And, until we deal with the deprivators (a word that's not even in the dictionary), the promise of equality under the law will not be realized.
As I've said before, never mind the victims.