Memo to the Tea-Baggers: God and Country Aren't with You

There must not be a tea-bagger alive who has ever had to sit all night in the Charity hospital in a city like New Orleans, waiting for the morning shift to call their number.

In hospitals across America, the uninsured wait there through the night in the midst of all that painful sickness, some with swine flu, others on the verge of a heart attack.

Others sit there in agony reading old magazines and drinking bad coffee, waiting for something as simple as a cup of pink-cocktail, the drink they mix for those who suffer severe acid reflux disease, a malady that sometimes hurts in your chest so bad you think you are having a heart attack. It is a mix of the anti-acid Maalox, Novocain to numb the esophagus, and the tranquilizer Xanax to relax the muscles and relieve the pain.

The only place you can get it in the U.S. is in a hospital emergency room. They serve it by the drink there, in a little plastic cup — for about $1,000 a drink.

I don’t know if there is a specific provision in the health-care reform bill just passed in the House to make sure poor people who need it can get that drink — without losing their houses or any chance at credit if they can’t pay that bill. But if a so-called “public option” means the hospital cannot deny you that drink and that the government must pay for it, the Senate better vote for that bill, and not just to save America’s poor.

Every time a poor person, who may be poor by no fault of their own, has to seek treatment in an emergency room, the doctors who get paid $700 an hour to treat them send the bill out anyway, knowing the cost will be borne by the rising costs of the bills of those who do have insurance. What do the insurance companies do to continue making their 30 percent profit so they can pay their white male executives a million dollars a year? They raise rates on everybody else, of course, which is the number one factor contributing to the growing squeeze on the middle class.

It is a vicious cycle that escalates until a few people have all the money and most people have none.

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