Health Care/Joan Retsinas

The No-Choice Election

Keep your eyes on the prize. The prize, this year of COVID-19, seguing into 21, is your health, more dramatically, your life.

We have exceeded 200,000 deaths from this virus that isn’t a hoax, isn’t a seasonal malady. It spreads so quickly that within days of opening campuses, universities reported double-digit numbers of infected students. Will they all get the virus? No. But some will, and some of them will be the “long haulers” whose symptoms linger. Are they all carriers, likely to infect their families, their friends, their colleagues, their casual acquaintances? The likelihood is there. The virus spreads at warp-speed.

We desperately need a President who will “model” the life-saving measures of masks and social distancing, who will stand behind the scientists who preach the facts, not the scientists he has chosen to parrot his agenda.

Will the economy suffer with continued “social distancing?” Yes, especially if we heed the CDC’s admonition that the virus spreads by “aerosal transmission” from people singing, shouting, sneezing indoors, in proximity to others. Gyms, restaurants, stores, churches, workplaces, sports stadiums - the 6-feet apart rule will leave doors ajar, not fully open. But with masks and “social distancing,” following the scientists’ urging, we can return to a new normal that lets us slowly open the country. Europe has done that.

Without those measures, we will blunder on, ignoring the virus, as the death toll mounts.

With four more years of this President, we face more Americans dead, more Americans subsisting on food stamps, unemployment insurance, and subsidies from a government whose coffers are low, thanks in part to the generous tax cuts this President enacted. Walk down Main Street. See the shuttered stores, the barely solvent restaurants, the companies no longer making the gizmos we are no longer buying. Supermarkets and delivery services will thrive; but those will not employ the millions of Americans left bereft.

Ultimately, the not-so-secret key to “opening up” the country will come with a vaccine, which scientists are working on. But do you trust this President to bless the tried-and-tested vaccine? Do you trust him to deliver doses to all Americans? HIs administration failed dismally with the provision of masks and personal protective equipment. For the tests, he waffled: Necessary? Maybe not. After all, the more tests, the more positive results, the worse the headlines. But even when the Administration more or less backed tests, the mishmash from a collection of companies left Americans with waits for tests, waits for results (a week-long wait renders a test almost useless), and sometimes astronomical bills, depending on an insurer’s fine print. Would you buy a used car from this President, let alone trust your life to him?

Beyond COVID, we still suffer from the usual maladies: cancer, diabetes, asthma, strokes, et al. Some are more lethal than COVID. What keeps a swathe of us alive? Medical care. And what gives us access to care? Insurance. To date, more than 22 million Americans rely on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. This President has vowed to scrap Obamacare, probably because it bears the name of his predecessor. The accomplishments of Obamacare merit mentioning, and re-mentioning. It outlawed exclusions for pre-existing conditions; it let dependents remain longer on parents’ policies; it offered subsidies to pay for insurance; it established a minimum base of benefits; it let states expand their Medicaid rolls. Consider: 12 states did not opt to do so. The “uninsured rate” of people with incomes below 200% of poverty in those states is now 20.6%. In the states that expanded coverage, the rate dropped to 10.9%. Without Obamacare, millions of Americans will have no health insurance, and restricted access if any to health care. We will resemble those countries that refugees are fleeing, with sick people living in shantytowns.

Again and again, look to the prize: your life, the lives of everybody around you.

And when you meet anybody who mentions the Dow, the illusory fence, the moribund coal industry, and/or the urban riots, remind them to keep their eyes on the prize.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020

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