A lightworker whom many of us know and love has had to go into the hospital today in Florida. We may have more to say about that later.
Because she lives in the southern United States and not in Canada, where I live, she’s had to incur a medical bill that has thrown her for a loop. Now a substantial portion of that has been attended to by another lightworker. That’s not why I write at the moment.
Why I write is to say this. Had she lived in Vancouver, where I do, she’d have gone into hospital and never have seen a bill. My brother who lives perhaps fifty miles away in Victoria went into hospital recently for a hip replacement and never needed to give a second thought to hospital costs, which were invisible to him.
In Canada we have universal medicare, one of the great blessings of life here.
In the United States particularly, but equally in other countries, the nation’s elite have decided that they don’t wish the country to share the cost of medical expenses for the population. They wish the burden to fall on the user alone and so many people are bankrupted by medical expenses or cannot use a hospital. Their choice is between bankruptcy over life’s predictable expenses or no care at all.
The elite would rather the money were used for endless wars or other “causes” that benefit themselves.
Of course this situation will soon end so I don’t need to beat the drum loudly. But I do regard it as a symptom of the soundness of our sleep that we allow ourselves to be persuaded that something as beneficial as “Obamacare” should be constantly opposed, eroded or postponed by forces that have no caring for the masses.
Tomorrow I could require a heart transplant, or extensive hospital care for the onset of some pernicious disease – it matters not what the condition or the cost. I need not worry that even my checking account, never mind my house if I owned one or my personal savings – would be affected.
For me nowhere more than health care does the inequity that we’ve tolerated for so long show up. It doesn’t require that we rise up and overthrow such a system. It’s on its way out and doesn’t require even a push from us any longer.
But I’ll be glad to see this time when people can be devastated by a hospital expense or unable to afford medical care at all pass away from us. And I do know that there are many areas of the world where routinely people have no access at all to medical care. All of that will pass away in four short months.
