The party was actually a fundraiser for a pillar of our little community. For 25 years our neighbor — I’ll call her Sally — has provided child care services for the pre-school children of this town.
She is a well-loved person among the children who grew up with her, some of whom are now adults themselves, and she has been nothing short of a god-send to a generation of working parents who have needed child care for their little ones.
Until a year or so ago, when she was diagnosed with cancer.
Sally is a small-business entrepreneur who has provided this town with a needed and valuable service, and she has done so with unfailing excellence. As a very small-businesswomen, though, she couldn’t afford health insurance, and so she has had to face cancer without it.
In addition, she hasn’t been able to work — little kids carry a lot of germs, and she can’t be exposed to that. So Sally has had to confront her illness without insurance and without her source of income.
And so our town gathered on a Saturday night to raise money to help Sally beat the disease.
In many ways, it was an inspiring evening. The huge crowd crammed into that small space and spilled out onto the sidewalk — all there because of the affection we have for this woman.
But at another level, the event was both absurd and tragic, and it underscored how utterly inadequate our health insurance system is.
Let’s be frank: In the face of cancer, with its courses of radiation and chemotherapy, its long and arduous recovery time and days when it is hard to get out of bed, we were holding a bake sale.
Which is why I expected to see at least one member of Ohio’s Republican congressional delegation there dancing with the rest of us. After all, these are the kinds of self-help events that Republicans are always telling us we should rely on to fix all our problems.
“Cookies for cancer” seems to be the prescription they are writing for all Americans with the bad luck not to have any health coverage.
Remember, they have all staunchly opposed any reform of the health insurance system, and they have not proposed any alternative to the status quo. Indeed, John Boehner announced that Republicans would defeat health insurance reform before there was even a bill to oppose.
George Voinovich has largely been silent on the issue, while voting against the reform.
Steve Austria, of course, achieved national celebrity by blaming the Great Depression, which started in 1929, on the New Deal, which started in 1933, so he’s been too busy to take much leadership on health insurance reform, or perhaps he’s been told to keep his mouth shut.
Of course none of them, nor any of the other Republicans in Congress, will defend the status quo out loud and in public. They have devoted all of their verbal and political energy to denouncing the reform efforts proposed by Democrats.
If you listen more carefully, however, you will hear a deafening silence. They have nothing to say to the 50 million Americans who live without health insurance, no alternative plan that will provide coverage to those who need it, no new ideas, no clue.
For her part, Sally’s situation might well be better and more secure under the reforms currently being hashed out in Washington, but she had the bad planning to get sick before those reforms have been passed. So given the fact that John and George and Steve don’t think Sally deserves health insurance, the least they could have done was show up and buy a few cookies.
They didn’t even send in a check – I asked the person taking donations.
Steven Conn is Professor of History at
Ohio State
University
and lives in Yellow Springs.