This is hard to watch. An Oklahoma woman whose husband has traumatic brain injury is kicked out of a hospital and she has no way to care for him. She goes to a town hall meeting run by her Rethughlican senator, Tom Coburn, who’s also a doctor for crissakes, and desperately pleads her case.
The first words that come out of his mouth is “I think…” Then he catches himself, and sympathizes with her for a brief instant and tells her to call his office in the morning. Then he returns to his anti-health care reform talking points, saying that that the government isn’t the solution to the problem, that’s what’s missing from the debate is neighbors helping neighbors.
While CNN anchor Rick Sanchez does a good job pointing out the obvious irony of Coburn promising to use his government office to help the woman and her husband while ranting against government involvement, I couldn’t help but wonder just how much caring for someone with TBI (which thousands of returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from due to roadside bombs) costs. So I looked it up:
While the costs of injury are often thought of in terms of the human suffering associated with death and disability, there are also grave economic costs. Society absorbs the cost in lost productivity when a person is unable to return to his or her job as a factory worker, accountant, homemaker, or student. Lost productivity is an indirect cost, while medical care and services are direct costs to the individual, family, and society. The long-term cost of care for one person with a severe traumatic brain injury has been estimated at $4.1 to $9 million by the National Head Injury Foundation (NHIF). It is not uncommon for a person with a severe TBI to require 5-10 years of rehabilitation and followup services.
I hope that woman has lots of wealthy neighbors, because if she doesn’t, it’s going to take a lot of bakesales to come up with that kind of dough.
Saitia,
Thank you for the pep talk. I do believe what is written (also what you just wrote). I guess I get mad at myself for feeling these kinds of feelings. Like I said, I don’t ever want to be like them. Sometimes it is hard to separate the sin from the sinner. But I would never pass one by if they needed help.
Mary, they may not ever recognize their hypocrisy; it’s our revulsion to them I’m talking about, the same revulsion that caused the Creator of the Universe to yell at them, “Woe upon all of you who reject truth and spurn mercy! Many of you are like whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful but within are full of dead men’s bones and all sorts of uncleanness. Even so do you who knowingly reject the counsel of God appear outwardly to men as holy and righteous, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and iniquity.”
It may sound hollow to some, but you can still hate the sin and love the sinner, even as Jesus did. But it did not stop him from denouncing their acts of hypocrisy in the strongest possible terms, and it shouldn’t stop us either.
Vast numbers of so-called Christians are actually, unwittingly, secularists; they are totally clueless about what it requires to love one another as Jesus taught. Remember; God is not mocked; each of us will be judged divinely according to the truth given to us; and it is forever true, Jesus said and will say:
“In the great day of the kingdom judgment, many will say to me, ‘Did we not prophesy in your name and by your name do many wonderful works?’ But I will be compelled to say to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me you who are false teachers.’ But every one who hears this charge and sincerely executes his commission to represent me before men even as I have represented my Father to you, shall find an abundant entrance into my service and into of the heavenly Father.”
“As this all gets more pointed, the religious right’s hypocrisy will become more obvious to other religionists, until their revulsion becomes palpable.”
But it seems as though the majority of them are hypocrites. So how the hell will the recognize hypocrisy if they all basically think alike?
I do hope your right, though. It’s just getting worse and worse every day. I’m so sick of these so-called “Christians” who give Christianity a bad name. You can only take so much. I never want to be a hater, but people like these make me feel like I’m becoming one. And I don’t like people who make me feel hateful toward them. I don’t want to become one of them.
As this all gets more pointed, the religious right’s hypocrisy will become more obvious to other religionists, until their revulsion becomes palpable. Those people may never wake up to their hypocrisy, just like the hypocrites Jesus condemned in his last days before they killed him.
Whether you see this as a “culture war” or a “right-left” conflict really doesn’t matter. What matters is your individual honesty before your highest self awareness, no matter what you call it. There’s a moral and ethical paradigm change coming with the passage of real health care for all Americans, and it may be the fulcrum we so desperately need to move our national ethic beyond the self-serving bigotry of republican selfishness and stupidity. I hope so.
nonnie9999,
I feel the same way. These people could give a shit less. Talk about Death Panels. Without any kind of health care, that is a death panel.
But the rethugs are so short sighted. Who is going to work for minimum wage to make all their donors wealthy if we don’t have health care? If they kill off all of the poor and middle class, or what used to be middle class, they won’t have any body left. You think people like Palin and Carrie Prejean would do all the shit work that we (or I) do? HaHaHa.
let’s hope she lives in a neighborhood full of physical therapists, nurses, and emergency physicians. funny how the rethugs were so worried about terry schiavo starving to death in hospice, but they don’t give a shit about this man starving to death in his own home, because his insurance company refuses to pay for his care. there’s a special place in hell for dr. coburn and his ilk.
What do you want to bet when the woman contacts his office they tell her they’ll get back to her? And then she’ll get one of those form letters like, ‘Sorry, can’t help’. Coburn is one of those people who got his M.D. to get rich, not help people.
And if these rethugs hate the government so frickin much, why the hell do they work for it?
Wow, Sherry, I hadn’t realized that the Medical Industrial Complex had stooped that low, manipulating religious beliefs that way.
If the debate was over reforming the Military Industrial Complex, I suppose we’d be hearing that war was necessary to provide opportunities for self-sacrifice for the “get to heaven” checklist.
Yeah, ain’t it something. Go ask your neighbors. Yeah, thats the ticket. That’s the crap I hear constantly from the right wing religious. Good grief, eliminate the poor and damn, we got no way to check that off our “get to heaven list.” We gotta keep individual charity or we can’t get ourselves in heaven. They make me sick.