The expression "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" comes to mind as I very tentatively publish my thoughts ... neither terribly well thought-out nor well-crafted for such a momentous event (to me at least) ... in my own blog space in the blogosphere. After many months of dithering about whether I would actually do this, I finally girded my loins (figuratively, because I'm not quite sure how one actually does that) and me voici! This happened today only because of a mighty challenge from "He Who Must Be Obeyed," that is, the lovely man with whom I have had the pleasure of sharing life more or less in common for the past 28 and counting years. That challenge was the final push.
Today and tomorrow are "count-down" days because my stay in Maryland for the year-end holidays will officially come to an end Wednesday, when I board the night flight to London for the first leg of my return trip to Geneva. It's been a very interesting and lively stay, punctuated by visits to see family members in Maryland and in Washington, DC, reconnecting with friends in the area and going through the inevitable rounds of medical appointments that seem to be more necessary and more frequent as the years mount up.
The biggest event was HWMBO's cataract surgery at Johns Hopkins University. It was as magnificently expedited and efficacious as it was unexpected. If the US health care system actually functioned like that all the time or even most of the time, we would indeed be the envy of the world. As things stand, however, this is the sad exception rather than the rule since most Americans are subjected to the decisions of health insurance company administrators rather than health care professionals. While the health care reform package currently being crafted in Congress looks to be the first advance in national health care reform since the establishment of Medicare, shame on all those who could not simply begin and end with extending Medicare benefits to the entire population. No one seems to be too concerned about the costs of waging seemingly endless war, but let there be a discussion of what might benefit ordinary citizens and the warmongers suddenly become fiscal hawks. Since HWMBO and I are both Medicare-eligible, we can already benefit from that system. For a price, to be sure. Even then, Medicare will not generally cover my medical expenses outside the United States. Sigh.
I have never understood and will never understand how anyone in the US who has never experienced what every other industrialized country in the world already has, that is, a functioning health care system that actually serves the needs of its citizens, can truly believe that we in the US have the best health care system in the world. We have excellent doctors and other medical professionals, to be sure; we have outstanding researchers and we have excellent hospital systems. But allowing those professionals to care for the people who need to be cared for does not seem to be the main focus of too many in the US Congress and most especially not the focus of the profit-driven insurance companies who are much too powerful in determining who lives and who dies. It seems to me that the so-called "death panels" are in fact here and have been for far too long.
Being generally an optimist, I believe that there are many who have worked too long and too hard to let this effort falter. Even though the final proposal likely to be enacted into law is not what I (and many others) had hoped for, it is still a beginning. Every journey, no matter how long, begins with one step. Let us begin!
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