Conservatives True Colors

A LUMP FOR LIFE, WHO CARES?

The doctor entered the hospital room, looking grim. “I'm afraid there's nothing more I can do for you,” he told my brother, who sat on the edge of the hospital bed with his left leg severed below the knee.
“What do you mean?” said Travis. “There are prosthetic legs being made by many companies these days.”
“Yes,” said the doctor a hint of anger creeping into his voice. “But your insurance has refused to pay for such treatment, saying that it is still experimental, even though it is a procedure approved by the medical establishment as safe and effective and having passed the experimental stage. Without insurance approval, the hospital won't allow it, and yes, Tom,” he adds to me as I open my mouth. “I know you have the money to pay for it yourself,but the hospital won't approve tat.”
“So what can we do?” I ask.
“I'd write to your representatives in Congress and urge them to pass the bill that would make this kind of denial illegal,” says the doctor.
“Well, as with my donations to their campaigns, I'm on a first name basis with most of them, that should not be too difficult to persuade them of,” I say.
The next morning I have letters in the mail to our two Republican Senators and our Democratic Representative.
Within two weeks, I hear from our Representative.
“Dear Tom,” he writes. “I appreciate the letter and your situation. Many suffering as your brother is suffering have no advocate such as you, and for their and his sake I am working hard to see that this bill does pass.” He gives a website that I can link to in order to encourage this, and I'm on the site doing so by evening that day.
A week later I hear back from both Senators, with letters so close to alike that it's not worth repeating both.
“Dear Thomas,” the letter starts off, a bad sign, for apart from mother no one I'm close to has called me Thomas since I was a child. “I am sorry for Travis's situation, but if this bill becomes law, anyone who has such an injury could get treatment, and those without your deep pockets we don't want having the same opportunities as we do, do we? Even those who currently have no insurance could get prosthetic limbs when they lose limbs. And,clearly your brother is under-insured, which either means he's too lazy to have bothered with proper insurance or for some other reason is undeserving of full coverage. Wasn't he a bit careless as a child? Maybe that's how he lost this limb, in which case it certainly should not be replaced.”
I gasp and for several seconds cannot catch my breath. The total indifference to my brother's suffering and near rejoicing in the similar suffering of the less fortunate than us is incomprehensible to me, and for anyone to call Travis lazy makes me so mad I can't see straight. He's worked for thirty-seven years for improvement of the lives of the less fortunate, and never once taken a single sick day often even pursuing his work on Sunday afternoons and Holidays.
“Need takes no days off, little brother,” he often tells me. “So why should I?”
And now he's going to spend the rest of his life an invalid, because my senators don't want people like those he's sought to help his entire adult life to stand any chance at all of getting the same or comparable treatment for the same or comparable injuries.
As soon as I am master of my emotions and faculties once more, I call my accountant, cancel all contributions to both of my senators campaigns and put the money into their opponents' campaigns and increase my contribution to my Representatives campaign.

With Travis out for awhile, I take management of his work, since my own business pretty much runs itself these days anyway, and I learn that our situation is far from unique or the worst of it.
“At least you heard back from your Senators,” says a client missing his right arm from the elbow down. “When I lost my favored arm and my insurance wouldn't pay for any treatment, my wife wrote dozens of letters to both senators and our representative asking why this practice was allowed by law, and our senators showed their indifference by never even responding.”

I meet a boy who lost both hands and whose father did hear back from the senators but heard that in their neighborhood the boy must have lost them to gang activity and so deserved to have lost them, even though there were ten eyewitnesses plus two video cameras that clearly showed that the boy lost his hands when part of a poorly constructed wall fell on them.

And of course there was the fifteen year old girl who took her own life in our office after hearing from our senators that her parents' insurance company was correct, justified and righteous for denying her mental health services after a traumatic brain injury caused by a near drowning incident.

After that, I must admit, Travis and I both agreed that his problems seemed minor by comparison, but we're both still shocked by our senators total indifference to all of this.

Eventually, of course, Health Care Reform did pass, but my brother, now in a wheelchair for life, and I and all of our clients are shocked and dismayed at the continued total indifference to all of those suffering permanent effects of treatable injuries and diseases of the entire Republican Party exemplified by federal and state attempts to undo the progress towards “Life,Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness” for all that has been made by making decent, affordable health care a right for all rather than a privilege for the elite few.