Donna Smith (of 'SiCKO'): I Can See Healthcare From Here

[marmar]

Published on Friday, June 25, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
I Can See Healthcare From Here

by Donna Smith


DETROIT - As I wake each morning here in Detroit at the US Social Forum, I glance just a few hundred yards across the way, and I know people have healthcare without regard to financial or other barriers. And it hurts like hell to see the cars "over there" winding along the river inside Canada and know that as I sit here in my own nation, I am without the basic human right to healthcare just because I am an American.

The feeling I get every time I glance that direction is the same one I had when I was a patient in Cuba during the filming of SiCKO. I feel sick to my stomach with anger and sadness and wonder why I have spent the past 25 years of my life fighting for healthcare that in other nations -- other rich nations and other poor nations - is long accepted as what people in a civilized society extend to and protect for one another.

I am gut-punched all over again. I want to curl up in a ball on the floor of my room and weep. I want to rage at the top of my lungs until the pain pours out somewhere else. I want to grab my husband and my kitty and a few of my old family photos and go where my life is valued enough to allow me to seek and receive care when we need it. Yes, I admit it. I am sick to death of the excuses for why we cannot extend healthcare to all without bankrupting folks, and I sometime dream of escape from it all.

At the US Social Forum, the potential to gather many voices and many forces together to move toward healthcare justice in this nation may or may not fully materialize. Sometimes the voices at the microphone calling for transformative health reform are as controlling and power-hungry as those who run the for-profit, medical-industrial complex. The loudest voices speak with officious verbiage and self-righteous certainty that can squeeze out the meek or those without the required activist pedigrees. In many movements for social change, there is an intricate power structure that can be hard to understand and even harder to accept. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/25-7

[mdmc]

1. I wish I had her vision

I still cant afford the medical treatment I need although I am fully insured..

[laughingliberal]

2. K & R nt

[xchrom]

3. recommend