I'm lucky. Both my parents are entering their ninth decade of life and in relatively good health. They're alive, vibrant, enjoying their golden years surrounded by legions of kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. Like all of us, at some point they might want to think about living wills and end of life decisions, if they haven't already. As Matt Taibi reports, Newt Gingrich was not only for living wills and end of life counseling -- what he and other right-wing extremists would later call 'death panels' -- just a few weeks ago he argued for including those services in Medicare:
More than 20 percent of all Medicare spending occurs in the last two months of life. Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin has developed a successful end-of-life, best practice ... [] The Gundersen approach empowers patients and families to control and direct their care. If Gundersen's approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year.
But a guy that looked and sounded exactly like Newt Gingrich had a diametrically opposite take just a few weeks later on This Week:
STEPHANOPOLOUS: The only thing that’s in the bill is that Medicare would pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on end-of-life issues.
GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned when you start talking about cost-controls... you’re asking us to trust the government. Now I’m not talking about the Obama administration, I’m talking about the government. You’re asking us to believe that the government is to be trusted. We know people who’ve said routinely, well, you’re going to have to make decisions. You’re going to have to decide. Communal standards, historically, is a very dangerous concept.
Of course the usual suspects were all for trusting the government in the Terry Schiavo case. So great was the GOP's belief in government interference in that one that Republican Governor Jeb Bush was reportedly considering ordering the police and national guard to storm the hospital in defiance of several court decisions -- at least until the public opinion polls turned so disastrously against the GOP.
Nor is Gingrich alone in his most recent intellectually dishonest makeover. As the Rachel Maddow Show reveals in a
segment aptly titled "
Even they don't believe what they're saying," Gingrich is joined by two other far right lackeys in equating living wills and government healthcare with a nefarious plot to kill the elderly, in between shilling for living wills for personal profit or as public policy. Which brings me back to what government healthcare has meant for my family.
Thanks to Medicare, my parents have survived heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, each requiring major, life saving surgery. They’ve had cataracts repaired, hold arthritis in check, and closely monitor and treat any signs of peripheral artery disease or pending stroke. That's why today they can enjoy a round of golf, shop for Christmas presents, hug their great-grandchildren, and do all the precious things more valuable to everyone in my family than any sum of money. To say that private, for profit health insurance could never offer our clan that option is a laughable understatement.
If Fox News, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the lying wingnut clowns had been around when Medicare was proposed, my mother and father would be, at best, blind and crippled in a homeless shelter due to medical costs. Probably with at least one or two of their medically tapped out adult children living in a dumpster across the street. Or, more likely, they would live only in my family’s memory. And make no mistake; this Republican war on affordable heathcare is a war on my parents and yours. It's a fundamental plank in conservative ideology and includes destroying Medicare, usually disguised by widely quoted bytes like ‘ let's get the government out of healthcare.’ Hunter succinctly summed them all up:
All of the people who say that they are afraid of socialized medicine but that they support Medicare are liars. All of them. They either secretly don't support Medicare but are unwilling to say such an unpopular thing out loud, for obvious reasons, or they aren't in fact afraid of "socialized medicine" but still want to use the talking point.
What’s so remarkable about my parents' healthcare battles and victories isn’t that they're unique; the remarkable thing is they are the norm. Millions of senior citizens are alive, pain free, and productive today as a direct result of a core value in the progressive movement: it's time for affordable, quality healthcare to be a right, not a privilege, for everyone.
If ever there was a time to take out that dry powder so carefully hoarded lo these many frustrating years, this is it. If ever there was a time when pastors and priests should be reminding their congregation that "whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me," it is here. If ever there was cause worth fighting for, healthcare reform is it. And if ever it was time you and I get off our blogging asses and start banging on doors or making phone calls, our time is now.