Via Bruce Maiman at Examiner.com:
During a Tuesday rally on health-care reform outside the office of Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy in Columbus, opponents of the effort berated Robert Letcher, who suffers with Parkinson’s disease. He was holding up a homemade sign that read, “Got Parkinson’s? I Do and You Might. Thanks for helping!”
[…] Turns out 60-year-old Robert Lechter was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s 15 years ago. He has two Master’s Degrees and a PhD from Cornell. He taught at the University of Michigan and worked as a nuclear engineer.__
Lechter was able to have a $150,000 surgery thanks to Medicare and the Cleveland Clinic. It has greatly increased his quality of life. He attended the event in Columbus because he believes in giving back and thinks everyone should have access to affordable health insurance and quality health care.
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Maiman continues:
We say we don’t trust the government, we don’t trust the political class, we don’t trust our community institutions. Mostly, we don’t seem to trust each other. The comment that struck me in the video clip was, “I’ll decide when to give you money.”
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It’s all about me.
[…] Do you think we’re suffering a lack of unity and is that lack of unity underscored by this debate over health care?
P-S: Mary Jo Kilroy is a freshman Democrat who won by a slim margin in this swing district in 2008. She’s considered vulnerable in this year’s midterm. She’s decided to vote yes for the final health care overhaul.
(Teabagger video at the link, if you haven’t seen it yet. Hat tip to commentor PeakVT — thanks!)
Snarky Pickles
I dare say Professor Lechter exhibits more personal courage and integrity, day-in and day-out, than any number of chanting, screaming, self-indulgent teabaggers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Kind of on topic: Capuano is gonna vote yes.
Mike Kay
Kill the Bill!
Sure a few people will die, but you can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs.
Call your representative and tell them: No Single-Payer, No Bill!
freelancer
Anne, your link to Examiner is broke. Take out the BJ address that prefaces it:
http://www.examiner.com/x-15870-Populist-Examiner~y2010m3d20-Parkinsons-patient-gains-national-attention-from-healthcare-rally-confrontation
Eric U.
OT: the North Koreans executed the finance minister blaming him for the results of a re-valuation of their currency. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100318/bs_afp/nkoreaeconomypolitics As Yglesias says, there probably is a suitable middle course of action between what they did and giving the guilty bonuses.
Darcy
It was PeakVT, in the open thread comment 23(I don’t know how to link). He/she has a few other goodies too. Thanks PeakVT:)
Steve L.
His disease is obviously a setup to make teabaggers look racist. Also.
FRIFL
It should be perfectly clear why teabaggers mobbed this man: Jesus don’t much like socialist fancy men with lots of teh book learnin’, so he gave him Parkinson’s. It’s the mark of the beast, you know.
Bad Horse's Filly
After all this crap, the f@gg*t and n!gg#$ comments today, I’m over even caring what anyone on the right thinks (who wants to tread through that sewer anyway). I hope Democrats ram (or Rahm) through all kinds of progressive bills, banking and insurance regulations and turns the Supreme Court liberal and anything else that will them off.
These assholes deserve nothing. It’s just a matter of time before they turn on themselves and with all the hatred they’re spewing, start killing each other. I await the day.
patrick II
“mostly we don’t seem to trust each other”
That mistrust is deliberately encouraged to isolate. That is at the core of a lot of Republican propaganda. “Free” can also mean powerless and susceptible. Individuals standing alone are easier to attack, which is the way they want us.
SIA
@Bad Horse’s Filly: Exactly. I was watching Obama’s talk at the dem caucus today, and Mr Screaming was surprised when O went after the repubs about their “friendly advice” and punched back a bit. Mr S is no O-Bot (as I am) but I think he was impressed with the tougher positioning. I’m hoping this is the post-Plouffe (or whatever prompted the change) Obama, will acknowledge the GOP has nothing, nothing at all to offer, and as you say, ram through some good progressive legislation. For those assholes who ridiculed the guy on the clip, all I can say, is “Living well is the best revenge”. This bill is going to pass, and they can gag on their own bile while we celebrate making history.
/rant over [for now]
BDeevDad
@Bad Horse’s Filly: This!
DougJ
Thanks for this post!
rikyrah
and the folks throwing bills at him couldn’t even spell nuclear engineer.
theturtlemoves
@Bad Horse’s Filly: I like to think of myself as a pacifist, but I really think the folks throwing money at this fellow need to get the shit beaten out of them. And I don’t mean figuratively. I mean somebody there should have clocked the guy in the tie and kept kicking him until he stopped moving. Reason obviously doesn’t cut it with this type of person, but a bigger bully might shut them up for a while.
mclaren
This will sound brutal, and so be it.
Here’s the brutal reality: Parkinson’s is incurable.
Right now, we can’t cure it. We can only barely treat it, with ever-increasing doses of L-dopa that eventually become toxic.
This case is a classic example of what the American health care system should NOT be doing.
Spending $150,000 on surgery that increases the quality of life for someone with an incurable and terminal disease means a death sentence for thousands of other people.
There’s only a finite amount of money out there to pay for our medical care, and $150,000 splurged on this guy with Parkinson’s means something like 1,000 homeless people or poor people or working poor people who couldn’t get treatment for their basic life-threatening conditions because our society chose to piss away $150,000 on this one guy with an incurable terminal illness that we can’t cure and can’t treat.
That’s insane.
Think about it, people. There are children out there with abcesses in their infected cavity-ridden teeth who are dying because they couldn’t get $500 or $800 worth of dental care. You could save the lives of 200 to 300 of those children instead of giving this one guy with an incurable disease a fantastically expensive surgery that “increases his quality of life.”
There are millions, literally millions, of people out there in America with ruptured spinal discs or chronic high blood pressure that eventually leads to kidney failure who could be effectively cured, completely and 100% made well again so they could go back to work instead of languishing on disability, with relatively inexpensive operations or a course of blood pressure medication.
50 to 100 of those people will die, they will die, because the money that got pissed away on this one guy with an incurable fatal disease for an extravagantly expensive operation to “improve the quality of his life” wasn’t available to help those other sick people — people who could be cured.
Folks, we need to face reality. If you have an incurable terminal illness, you will die. As a society, America needs to make these people as comfortable as possible. We need to do everything we can to make their decline and inevitable death reasonably decent and humane.
But at the end of the day, America as a society does not have the goddamn money to piss away on $150,000 operations that “increase the quality of life” for terminal patients with an incurable fatal disease.
America has got to suck it up. If you get diagnosed with ALS or AIDS or Parkisnon’s or some other fatal illness we can’t cure and can’t effectively treat, then you need to face the fact that you are going to die. And our society has got to start giving those people with incurable fatal illnesses a morphine pump to take home with them and instructions for how to end things when t he pain gets too bad.
That’s just the reality. Pissing away insane amounts of money like this on a crazy pointless super-expensive operation that marginally increases the comfort of someone who is going to die of an incurable terminal disease is absolutely nuts. This is example numero uno of everything that is wrong with American health care.
The thousands of children or homeless people or working poor adults who will die because this one guy got a super-expensive operation stand mute and silent witness to the flagrant insanity of our entire health care system. It’s nuts. It’s fundamentally evil.
Cue the kooks and cranks and crackpots to crawl out of the woodwork and claim that this represents a false choice because the money spent on that one guy’s $150,000 operation wouldn’t have been available to spend on dental care for kids with abcesses or blood pressure medication to save the kidneys of sick working poor people.
That’s a lie. The hard cold fact is that spending money on medical care in the American system is a zero-sum game. Every dollar spent on some arcane elective surgery is a dollar not available for much more basic preventive care that will save the lives of people who desperately need simple inexpensive treatments…but can’t get them because of American society’s gross misallocation of medical resources.
Obviously the teabaggers are insane and evil…but America’s crazy misallocation of medical resources is almost as insane, and almost as evil.
AW
@16
“Obviously the teabaggers are insane and evil…but America’s crazy misallocation of medical resources is almost as insane, and almost as evil.”
15 years ago my Dad should’ve been dead in 2 years. Terminal, incurable, but so is life. Is he still dying? Yeah. But with the right medication it’s not fast enough to make a difference.
Everyone dies, except me, I’m immortal, but even though the rest of you are fucked, if the fix is out there, and it works, and it can be paid for, go for it. Science is magic like that.
mclaren
How many hundreds or thousands of people with easily treatable curable illnesses died because your Dad got hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of health care for his incurable illness?
Nobody wants to ask those kinds of questions. Your Dad sure doesn’t want to ask “How many thousands of people am I killing by sucking up this much health care for my incurable illness?”
But we’re going to have to start asking those kinds of questions. If you think the way health care costs have been rising is any way sustainable, guess what? That’s a fantasy.