Crushing Relationships under Medical Debt. Among the other crimes of the Republican right wing is destroying marriages by inflicting extreme hardship upon couples from medical bills. Our self-appointed 'defenders of marriage' have ravaged marriage thru their refusal to permit us to adopt universal health insurance, which has trapped uncountable Americans in profoundly oppressive medical debt. Since money problems are a major cause of divorce, it is beyond-contention true that the Republican Party has produced large numbers of divorces that would not otherwise have occurred, all of this devastation so we don't have to raise taxes on the rich and super-rich, who wouldn't miss the money, they'd have so much left. So much for Republican "family values".
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On Dr. Phil today, a particularly immature and selfish woman was hilited as saying she deeply resented the economic hardship into which her husband's liver transplant plunged them. To Dr. Phil's and the audience's astonishment, this stupid woman admitted aloud, as tho no shame were due, that she resents having gone deep into debt to pay the bills for her husband's liver transplant and the followup medications that alone keep him alive! Dr. Phil said that "the word 'selfish' doesn't cover" her attitudes, and reproached her very publicly, as to ask if she'd rather her husband were dead than that she be saddled with bills. She said no, of course not, but she doesn't see why she should have to pay for his misfortune.
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Dr. Phil tried reverse psychology, asking how she would feel if (heaven forfend) she had come down with breast cancer and her husband were saddled with her bills. She let on that she'd want him to bear that responsibility, and he said he would absolutely be willing to pay that price to keep his wife alive, because he loves her, and that's just what you do when you love someone.
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But Dr. Phil asked the wrong question.
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The question he should have raised, but didn't, is more basic than that, and has three parts: (1) why should anyone assume personal responsibility for the ravages of nature, which victimizes people randomly and without reason, as makes plain to any sensible observer that disease is a social, not personal, responsibility? (2) why didn't you just declare bankruptcy (when that was possible) so you don't risk having to sell your house and move into an apartment just to pay medical bills, and (3) why do we as Americans, citizens of the richest country in the history of the world, allow our government to continue to destroy the lives of decent people by saddling them with crushing debt for medical expenses, when all the rest of the industrialized world has universal healthcare, so that no one is crushed by medical debt?
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The Dr. Phil show is not political. This blog, this society, are. Dr. Phil should, beyond question to my mind, have protested the evil that victimizes us uniquely in all the industrialized world. He did not. But, then, there's a lot wrong with Dr. Phil. That plain, outspoken good-ole-boy from the South sometimes just doesn't "get it".
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I should be on TV to correct mistakes that people like Dr. Phil and multitudinous other commentators make. As my mother used to say playfully when we'd complain about something beyond personal control, "Comes the revolution ... !". That was the entire emphatic utterance, meaning, "Once the revolution arrives, we'll fix that!" Where is this revolution? I've been waiting half a century.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,997.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:33 PM