I posted this nearly 14 years ago. In light of our President's just-announced "cancer moonshot",
It might still interest you.
Originally appeared 7-12-09
I was five when "Pap" died. Pap was my grandmother's next door neighbor and, like most who lived in our neighborhood, he was a working man, a laborer. One of my grandfathers died the year after I was born and the other I saw maybe twice a year. Pap filled in for them on an almost daily basis. He let me "help" in his garden and let me pet his beagles whenever I wanted.
I came home from school one afternoon that fall of my first grade year and my grandmother told me to sit down at the kitchen table. Both my parents worked and we stayed with "Nanny" after school. She said she had some real sad news and that I needed to be a "big boy". "Pap died today. His heart was sick and it quit working. The ambulance came, but it was too late", she explained, speaking softly and earnestly.
I cried. Eventually, I asked what is always asked: "Why? Why did he have to die? Why couldn't the doctors make him well? Why couldn't they save him?"
Nanny explained that doctors and hospitals and medicine cost a lot of money and Pap didn't have a lot of money. Rich people bought medicine and had surgery and went to hospitals. "Poor people just die", she said, as gently as possible and held me while I sobbed into her apron.
In the fifties, I overheard several hushed conversations between my parents and other adults that featured the word "cancer". I didn't understand what it was, but I knew it was bad, very bad. Only later did I understand that even "routine" cancers were usually a death sentence for those without insurance or wealth or both. Family members maintained gruesome vigils while the tumors spread throughout their loved ones body and sometimes the stench of necrotic tissue required those attending to the dying to smear Vicks under their nose to keep from retching.
Are we to return to those days? Are we to once again allow money to be the real medicine in our nation? Will we be too busy to march on Washington? Too busy to hound our senators and congressmen to vote for AT LEAST a public option for health care insurance?
I can accept wealth allowing some to drive a Mercedes or a Porsche while others drive Chevys or ride the bus.
I cannot accept wealth allowing some to live while others "just die".
= new reply since forum marked as read
all that was already happening. People survive cancer now who died before, some types almost routinely. The medical technology prospects for the future are awesome.
Most of the 17-year-ish political lag that normally occurs after something like Hillary's national healthcare was defeated had run its course and the public was developing interest again. Need had only gotten worse.
Biden's "Cancer Moonshot" was announced and kicked off back during Obama's presidency. Of course, then came various Republican disasters including trashing a trillion dollars of critical research in the name of "cutting fat," and of course 2016, but that's the way it is. The ACA has been up and running for years, and we're expanding coverages and will be expanding them more. And research has done great things in spite of all the governmental tribulations.
Go, Moonshot!
