fattypatties

In a sense, Health Care Reform in the United States took a giant leap forward yesterday. No comprehensive, universal health care plan in the US has ever made it this far.

The vote was 220 to 215. Very close. And it came with a price that may have been too much to pay.

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy it passed. But I think what the 5 vote margin suggests is that the money being spent by the insurance industry and other interested parties came dangerously close to working in spite of strong popular support of needed reform.

The really sad part is that in the overall picture of what needs to be done to improve health care in the United States this is a baby step towards a baby step. We really are barely crawling here.

But I do believe that there is no hope of anything significant happening unless the current reform passes into law. My greatest fear is that this has been made so hard to do that once it is done, everyone will pat themselves on the back and go home, satisfied that something has been accomplished. But in the interest of allowing the baby to crawl first, I'll wait to post on what I think needs to be addressed next after universal access.

AND, to keep things in perspective, a lot has to happen before that current reform passes into law.

The only thing we can be sure of at this point is that even in this so-called bad economy, a lot of money is going to continue to flow in Washington. According to OpenSecrets.org, health related industries continue to lead lobbying efforts in 2009. Money that should be used to pay for health care for their clientele is going to be used to fight these bills. Where do these companies get all this money? From sales of premiums and drugs (services and products, just like every other business). That fact alone ought to tell us what's wrong with current access system. These businesses have enough extra money in their coffers to spend billions fighting this legislation.

I plan to be contacting my Senators frequently over the next few weeks.  I hope you will consider doing so as well.  We need to remind them that we will remember their vote on this come election time.  We also need to follow-through on this promise to remember. 215 representatives yesterday said our health was less important to them than their financial gain. We should not forget their names or their selling-out of our lives.

This is a moment in American history that should be remembered for a long time to come and those who would waste our time, money and health need to be held accountable.

Everyone has limits. We have things that we are capable of doing and things we are not. Some of us can sing melodiously. Some of us have tin ears. Some of us can hit a baseball with a bat or a puck with a hockey stick or a golf ball with a club powerfully. Some of us cannot hit the broadside of a barn with a cannon.

I remind myself of this when I think of myself as person with disabilities. I often tell people I am no longer a talented walker or standing for long periods of time is not my best skill. It's funny. I have spoken and written publicly often about disabilities and mobility issues and accessibility, but I forget my own disabilities most of the time. I just don't think about it because I've developed habits that allow me to move around in the world. I don't think about it because I rarely test it.

In August, I got my real estate license. Suddenly, I am now faced with these limitations. Showing properties is a physical activity. There is no getting around it. It requires walking and standing in empty spaces without the support of benches or chairs. It can involve stairs and long sidewalks and porches and a number of other physical activities that put me against my own limits.

Since most housing is NOT accessible, using devices doesn't solve the problems. So even if I could afford a scooter, it would still make it nearly impossible to do this part of the job.

I have solutions in mind, but they are had to explain to others and thus the question keeps coming up and all of the sudden I am thinking about myself as a disabled person a lot more than I want to or am used to doing.

But I am disabled. I have nerve damage in my left foot that makes walking and standing difficult. I have chronic illnesses that sap my energy and make me have bad days with sleepless nights.

I don't like limits.

I don't like them one little bit.

I'm sitting here installing my printer/scanner/copier software on my computer even though I've had the freaking printer for years. Why? Because like every other gadget this week, it refuses to do what it has always done and is insisting that I'm missing software. If it were just the computer that has given me grief this week I'd be suspicious of my little bout with the trojan a couple of Saturdays ago. But I've no hot water for nearly a week (just got fixed yesterday), my digital antennae all of the sudden has decided that it can't find stations it found before (including PBS at the time the National Parks series has been on, which really pisses me off), my van has decided to stall out if I go under 10 mph, software/hardware in the classroom has not worked, my online communication and assignments with students have gone bonkers and I can"t seem to troubleshoot it, and ... well you get the idea. Coupled with the fact that my eyes are swollen from allergies and look like I've been crying for weeks and I haven't had a good night's sleep or a true day off in about a month, I've had an annoying week. I'm sure all of this isn't helped by the fact that I'm still hormonal as hell, having hot flashes all night long and am irritated by the slightest shift from expectations.

In other words, I've been a joy to live with this week.

But at least I got a blog post in, dammit!

Mary Whorley at Whorley Dervish shared Rachel Maddow's School of Crock segment (those of us over 35 know the reference). She writes:

The Republicans were there so that Baucus would have plausible deniability along the lines of "the Republicans made me do it," which is politically less damning than "I did it for my corporate masters."

This is a game that has been going on in our two party system for years. The Republicrats owe their livelihood to big corporate interests (Read carefully -- I mean both sides of the aisle). Baucus did what he did because he was well paid:

The Montana Democrat is enjoying this largesse — some $3.9 million in contributions from the health care industry since 1989 — principally because of his place as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The panel is at the center of this year's health care debate, and on Wednesday Baucus released his view of how the medical system should be reshaped: an $856 billion, 10-year package of changes.

The stream of generous campaign contributions from doctors, drug makers, hospitals and other medical interests didn't stop at the chairman's door. It extends to the other members of the so-called Gang of Six, the two Democratic and three Republican senators who labored with Baucus since June to produce what he hoped would be a bipartisan bill. All have received above-average donations from the health-care world.

...

Among them, the six senators have raised $10.7 million since 1989 from the industries and people with the most at stake financially in the overhaul effort. That's an average of nearly $1.8 million apiece over that period, more than triple the roughly $560,000 average for all other senators and representatives.
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So the acid test is here. Now that we have bills going to both chambers. There is a way for good health care reform to still pass. It would have to be fast and it would NOT be bipartisan. But it could happen. If the Democrats have the balls and really mean it, they can do it.

If they don't do this. If they pass the Baucus bill and not the house bill or something closer to the Baucus bill than HR3200, then they never meant it.

We need to hold the Democrats and Obama accountable.

Well the good news is that I haven't had hives a lot, the black cohosh & progesterone cream are helping (not totally, but the hot flashes are down to only a couple a day and not constantly) and I have more work than I know what to do with.

The bad news is I find myself neglecting the fun stuff like writing here and journaling at home and taking a moment to care for myself or spend time with my husband. Oh yeah, and, well, more work doesn't seem to equal more money. But what's new with that.

Here's the big news of the month. My husband finally had a doctor tell him what's been wrong for the past year. He has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It is good to know what it is. It is good to finally have a doctor take him seriously. But after the initial relief of having a name, we are now coping with the fact that this isn't going to go away easily and the quick karma that comes with fibromyalgia.

I was diagnosed with this condition in 1997. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of research and I've learned to understand my own body better. In the past couple of years I've come to understand the underlying conditions that led to my condition -- specifically, I have come to believe that the source of much of my problems has been hypothyrodism. I was originally diagnosed with lupus and had many of the symptoms associated with lupus when I started getting ill. But now that I am testing positive for hypothyroidism and have read more and discussed the situation with my doctors, I think the lupus was a misdiagnosis. I believe I had subclinical hypothyrodism.

Our conditions lead me to ponder two big stigmas in health care & health research in this country.

First, is fatness. No one regarded my gaining a considerable amount of weight in a small amount of time in 1997 as a sign that my thyroid was growing weaker. It was decided then that because I was in pain most of the time and had lost the energy to ride my bike the 20 miles a week that I had before, that my lack of exercise led to the 90 pound weight gain in 5 months. Looking back with more critical eyes (it wasn't until 2000 that I started questioning so-called medical science regarding weight), I now realize that probably didn't make much sense. Because hypothyroidism is connected with weight gain it is under-reasearched and under-treated.

Second is gender. Deciding that because something is predominantly diagnosed by one gender or another it becomes a "woman's disease" or a "man's disease" is problemmatic, espcially if doctors remain misinformed. It took 4 months for me to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It took Carl 12 months to have the same diagnosis even though his symptoms were much more clearly defined and obvious (especially in retrospect). Expectations of pain and manhood along with the decision that fibromyalgia is a woman's condition really got in the way of what is a very simple diagnosis--a touch test of 18 points on the body. It was a year of negative tests and being told he was just "getting older" before a doctor did the test. The eventual diagnosis took less than 2 minutes.

As we contemplate health care reform in this country, a lot of debate has taken on a "blame the victim" tone. I actually heard a doctor today say on "Talk of the Nation" that health care professionals would take better care of their own bodies if they weren't so busy taking care of lazy people who do not do what they should to prevent their health conditions. Yep, doctors are too busy doing important stuff to eat right and exercise, but the rest of us are just lazy. I turned off the radio at that point, screaming a few explitives.

Stigma doesn't help anyone. Lifestyle and prevention methods have their place, but they are not the solution nor the problem. Stigma will do more to kill than these other issues and the answer isn't to shame others into a better lifestyle.