Sunday, October 11, 2009
Decency requires that we act
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Archer Livengood,
Livengood, of Roanoke, is a retired locomotive engineer.
Our greatness is that we provide our citizens with a way of life that guarantees individual personal freedoms as long as they do not interfere with another's freedom. Our greatness means we take care of our people. Our greatness has nothing to do with the fact that we can annihilate the entire world many hundreds of times over with bombs to spare, or that we have the most modern Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Our greatness surely isn't that we send our warriors out to places where we might have been better off in not sending them.
There are some problems I see now, that in the past I thought only pertained to third world countries. I was wrong.
Can we feed all our people? Can we cure their sickness and provide the money for that medical care? Can we give them a place to live and not be in want? Have we provided a clear path to the future for our children and their children through education that will help them compete with kids from other countries? Or do we just say that a high school education is enough?
Oh, yes, we can do all the things listed above. But we do not do them all to all -- just to the lucky few.
The last year that the World Health Organization sent out rankings, France was No. 1 in quality of health care. We were ranked 37th.
That is not good enough. The quality of our health care is a myth. Is it not? If you don't have it, the quality can't be too good can it? The World Health Organization has no ax to grind. They call it as they see it. How do you see it? I have Medicare and a good supplement, so I'm pretty safe. If you still have your job with health insurance, you also are OK that is until you are laid off.
In its Aug. 31 issue, Time magazine gave a notice about a new book by T.R. Reid. This fellow claims the following stats: 20,000 Americans die each year because they are denied access to health care because they have no insurance, and 700,000 Americans declare bankruptcy each year because they have been hospitalized but cannot pay the outrageous charges. The name of the book is "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care."
Now is the time to start thinking about others, and not just about ourselves. I don't need President Obama's health care reform, and I didn't need Bill Clinton's way back then, but millions of others needed it and still do.
As a practicing Christian, I think America should have health insurance for all its citizens. Read both your New and Old Testament and you will immediately see many, many texts on how we should take care of the poor. Other than the subject of salvation, there are more texts in there about taking care of the poor than any other subject that I can find.
Think about it. Talk about it. Let's find a solution. There must be a way to get this done. Human decency demands it.
