O My America: Mercy, Mercy

by Lawrence Bush

My 91-year-old mother took a fall this week. She bounced, broke nothing, but is suddenly in need of 24-hour care, at least temporarily, so that she doesn’t fall again. My goal is to keep her in her assisted living apartment. But we don’t have the means to pay for 24-hour care for more than a couple of weeks. The social worker at the place told me we could spend down her little bit of money and then get her onto Medicaid. She warned me that it would take months of applying and tons of paperwork.

I work 70 hours or more a week. I can hardly wait to apply for Medicaid in my spare time.

My 25-year-old son, meanwhile, has been kicked off his “Healthy New York” insurance plan because he didn’t know that he has to prove, once a year, how little he makes at the radio station (where he works his butt off) to qualify.

So this afternoon, my wife was on the phone with Healthy New York while I was on the phone with an insurance agent — oh, but not about my mother, no (that’ll have to wait), but about my own new, overpriced health insurance plan, which we had to acquire after my COBRA ran out . . . .

Blah blah blah.

Why is our society so merciless? Why should people worried about their health also have to worry about paperwork, forms, billing, spending down, unreturned phone calls, and so on? Why can’t we have Medicare for all, forever?

Don’t tell me we can’t afford it. Of course we can afford it. We just have to spend a lot less on killing people, and a lot less on helping other people kill people — and we have to tax the obscene profits of corporations, and cap the obscene salaries and bonuses of CEOs — and we have to eliminate the profit-making health insurance industry, which absorbs tons of the premium money for no reason but their own profits. That would do it.

The good ol’ Midrash teaches that when God created the world, God asked: “If I create the world with the attribute of mercy alone, its sins will be too many; if with justice alone, how could the world be expected to endure? So I will create it with both justice and mercy, and may it endure!”

Republican villains, Democratic toadies, hear this: Have mercy, have mercy, or someday we will have no mercy on you.