Note: Seema Verma is President Trump's nominee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the United States.
Dear Seema,
I'm a Registered Nurse who works in Boston, Massachusetts. I have witnessed first-hand what it is like for people to go without insurance, to delay preventive health screening only to find out that cancer is a far more expensive problem.
There are not a lot of things that make my proverbial blood boil, but reducing access to preventive healthcare, including maternity benefits, does. It makes me so angry I can't see straight.
Look, I get it. Health care is expensive. Someone has to pay for it. But everyone bears the burden of an unhealthy society and while the Affordable Care Act (aka Obama Care) was not perfect, it began to put some policies in place that have been needed for a long time.
I come to this not from any political party line. I am a proudly independent voter - in fact, prouder by the day that I don't buy into that assanine system called "two party." I also live in Massachusetts where a Republican governor put health care reform as a top priority over 8 years ago and we are slowly reaping the benefits.
When, at your confirmation hearing, you mentioned that coverage for maternity benefits should be optional, I shook my head in disbelief.
Optional? Optional? I had to repeat it to myself to believe that you actually said it. The argument goes that if you're a man or too old to get pregnant, then why should you have to pay for someone to have a baby? The lack of logic and understanding in that idea astounds me! The logical conclusion is that I shouldn't have to pay for any of the choices that others make. So, by your logic, I shouldn't have to pay for the business man who has a heart attack and needs bypass surgery. After all, I wasn't the one who ate and drank too much. It was him.
Maternity benefits are an essential part of a healthy society. Maternity benefits speak to the value of family and children, they provide essential care for a future generation.
As Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Women says: "We buy insurance for uncertainty and to spread the costs of care across a broad population so that when something comes up, that person has adequate coverage to meet their needs," But insurance is not designed to be an "a la carte approach". "Women don't need prostate cancer screening, but they pay for the coverage anyway."
When as a nation did we allow politics to co-opt our health, to feed us misinformation about insurance and that terror-producing term 'socialized medicine'? Truth is the term 'socialized medicine' is a made up phrase. It was first heard in the early 1900's but came into wide use when the American Medical Association fought against a national health insurance plan proposed by President Truman. It conjured images of a hammer and sickle approach to health care that would lead us down the slippery slope to communism. That was in 1947 - and it was a public relations coup, for in the six and a half decades since that time we have allowed the term to rule us, to be thrown around willy nilly to produce fear and anger, obnoxious and ignorant voices leading the way.
Here's what happens when you let politics coopt prevention:A breast cancer lump ulcerates and eats away the flesh of a breast; a cervical lesion, easily removed, grows and turns into a completely preventable cancer; a gnawing indigestion and bloated feeling turns into cancer eating away at your colon - fully preventable had screening taken place early in the disease process. You know what else happens when politics coopts prevention? Abortion rates, already far too high, go up. You can't have it both ways - you can't want abortion rates to go down and yet reject the notion of maternity care and birthcontrol coverage.
Preventive health is not about being Republican or Democrat or Independent or Green Party or Libertarian. Preventive health is about the health of a society as a whole; it is about being human, living in a broken world where illness and death and "pre-existing" conditions are a reality. Preventive health and being sick is not about politics. When will we in the United States get that?
What you should want to do in your tenure is make the Affordable Care Act better! You should want to expand on it and leave a legacy that puts Obama Care into the water. You should want to make a name for yourself as a person who makes health care great, not just tolerable.
Instead, I'm shaking my head and saying: "What in the name of Sam Hill is she thinking?"
C'mon Seema! Be a Woman. Stand up for what is right.
