I’m a former welfare mother.
I’d just quietly offer that I’ve known the struggles in that arena firsthand. Scared by them, scarred by them, and strengthened by them. All of the above.
And, it’s for those reasons that I’ve been following the SCHIP debate. I’ve been looking and reading and wondering, How will SCHIP in any form make child health care be different for the poor now?
How will the children of the working poor, the poor and downtrodden, the poor and incapable… not so easily be left to suffer through illnesses, or else die because even minimal interventions that could help, were out of reach?
Will such aid as proposed by SCHIP, pay for preventative medical care that can ward away childhood illnesses that are otherwise devastating if left to fester
… like childhood diabetes type one, for instance, which when caught can be helped, and if not caught, can lead to blindness, neuropathy; loss of sensation in limbs, and diabetic coma.
But before final decisions about all of those matters, I have another question that keeps returning. Am I just missing something, or has the contretemps about ‘who is saying what to assassinate whose character’ with regard to SCHIP debate, created a smoke-screen that is making us forget that FIVE additional major players are needed to hammer out an effective plan of child health care, have been significantly missing from the debate and negotiation table?
1. Insurance companies, which have the ability to cluster patients across a broad spectrum of risk, and lower their rates reasonably, as well as humanitarily… insurance companies \also have the ability to work out a plan to cover pre-existing conditions in children at reasonable charge. Yet, we hear little about how they will contribute to the solutions regardless of whether they are direct insurers or whether the government will be.
2. Churches are major players in helping those in need. They have the potential under President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, to be deeply funded and deeply involved in child health care. Yet, we hear little from them.
3. Pharmaceutical companies, the same as insurance companies, have ability to create new and/or further expanded policy to offer low cost programs for ‘the real deal’ drugs. We have heard little from them
4. The Hospital Industry, which is a set of corporations that is for profit and can, if they choose, create a subsidiary temenos that subsidizes for tax write off, the care of the children of the poor.
5. Doctors and nurse practitioner groups at the national organization level, can contribute much to the dialogue/ debate about what would be needed to keep costs down and quality care high for children of the poor.
Each of these five powerful corporate and professional groups have within their reach, enormous public relations machinery to state their cases in the SCHIP debate: how they’d help, what they can do, how they see it all…
Yet isn’t the hot under the collar ‘irate debate’ actually leading us away from the most salient questions about how come these five have so little presence at this time?
I’d add a sixth group too, one that has no pr machine at all, or barely so. The genuinely poor. The poor who have children. Thus far none of the poor have had a voice in this debate.
There’s an old saying in our family: You cant craft a pair of shoes that will fit even half-way, without first measuring the foot that will wear them.