I believe that well-to-do professional retirees are being exposed to the realities of the modern American workplace as a result of the health care reform effort, and they don’t like what they see.
I recently got email from a right wing acquaintance, who forwarded a whine-o-gram from her urologist about the health care reform bill. I undoubtedly wasted my time writing a lengthy reply. One thing continues to gnaw on me, however.
It involved my reaction to the Urologist’s points:
- I, personally, know of three medical students who have decided to drop out of med school and pursue other careers as they fear getting a very expensive education and being forced to be a “government” doctor.
- I know of 19 doctors under 63 who have “quit”. Most of them just could not take the paperwork and decreasing reimbursement.
I work for a technology company. I loved my job up into the mid 2000’s. Sometime since that period, the ever-present pressure to do more with less has taken on new meaning. We started outsourcing some of our work. Which meant we started working late nights and early mornings to be able to sync up with the other developers. Then the layoffs started. Initially it was a big event with lots of attention. Now the novelty is off: someone disappears every few months, including competent engineers who’ve been with the company for years. We’ve heard that it’s highly unlikely our group will do new hiring in the US. My company stopped giving regular raises about ten years ago. Now it’s only a sort of “reward for good work”, but that has progressed to the point where a very small percentage are actually rewarded. Things have gone from a situation where I enjoyed my job and felt a sense of unity with my coworkers and pride in the company to one where I feel like a completely replaceable cog in a machine. I feel lucky to still have a job, always planning for sudden unemployment and sort of numb to the incessant dripping of layoffs. I make my life sound miserable, and it isn’t at all, but there has certainly been a relative shift in this direction. I’m sure many people could share their own version of this: it is the story of working America in the last few decades. And there’s a loss of dignity and personal value that’s involved.
My initial reaction to the Dr’s points were: “you can quit at 63? Good!” And I felt bad about thinking that. But seriously: in this devastated economy, there are so many people who would love to have a job, even if it involved paperwork and they couldn’t afford a Lexus. We’ve all seen our earnings slide due to pressures for efficiency and from “more affordable geographies”. I’m not sure of all the responsibilities of a urologist, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a large percentage of their work can be handled by a trained technician making a third the salary plus some video cameras and a urologist in Hyderabad. So whether the cost reduction pressure comes from the insurance companies using health care as an excuse or from the government that is trying to make health care affordable for more people, all of which have had the same pressure on their salaries, it was only a matter of time.
And the thing that occurs to me is: these doctors, and the old, white retired professionals, all seem frozen in attitudes from the past, when professionals with college degrees were in high demand and well paid and respected. Looking through this filter, it looks like the evil ObamaCare is taking away their dignity. I suppose that it’s easy to succumb to theories that the lazy youth of today are unwilling to work hard and want giveaways. They retirees have been isolated from the reality of the last decade, where competent, productive people like themselves have seen their buying power slashed and have often lost their jobs in the relentless pursuit for corporate profits. (And of course this wave washed over our industrial sector decades ago.)
I could understand why working people feel frustrated at the way things were going: change is happening and they feel left behind and unable to participate and compete. Less jobs, new skills required, less compensation, etc. But I didn’t really understand why well-to-do retired white professionals seem so extremely hostile to reforms that to me seem to be obviously needed and well past due. I think these people are generally out of touch with the day to day water torture that those of us in the workforce have felt. They do have a lot of contact with health care professionals, however, perhaps in some cases even bonding with them to some degree. So when the relentless pressures to cost reduce and cut corners starts to be felt in this area, it actually touches their lives, they internalize the stories they hear from their doctors and identify with them, and it seems like an assault on their dignity. They actually think that they are special. That’s a fantasy that most of us working folks abandoned a while back, and that’s part of the disconnect we have with understanding them.
I think that much of the cost pressure is being exerted by insurance companies, hiding behind the health care reform law. And I don’t want to discuss the merits of cost cutting and outsourcing here, since that’s a vast topic on its own. But this is the America we live in. What we need to do is to help seniors see the big picture, and that the effects they and their doctors are feeling are nothing new to working Americans.