‘Pardon me, but your emergency is not necessarily mine’

Lucinda Wingard

Guest columnist

I have to remind myself from time to time that my enthusiasms and my problems are not universally shared. On the other hand, it seems to me that, with an escalating number of emergencies, other people’s stress is actually affecting my comfortable life here in Gig Harbor.

As problems become more complex and widespread, Americans turn to government for help. We demand that it protect us from foreign attack and local crime. We expect it will educate our children and our neighbors. We want it to safeguard our financial opportunities.

Reading The Gateway provides many examples of citizens calling on government to support quality-of-life initiatives, such as parks, transportation or low-cost, reliable energy.

This raises a dilemma in our thinking: On the one hand, we’ve been trained to fear Big Government; on the other hand, we’ve been trained to believe it’s government’s responsibility to ensure our “pursuit of happiness.”

In that vein, it discourages me to hear people vilify government and hope it fails, and it’s tragically amusing to hear the same people demand help when they, personally, suffer an emergency.

If their house gets flooded or burnt, if they lose a job, if they need justice, it’s on the government’s dime. If they lose savings in the stock market, the government must step in. If they can no longer afford taxes on their property, they shouldn’t have to sell; the government should make it possible for them to stay where they choose to live. Taxes, after all, are evil.

Which brings me to the emergency over ballooning insurance and health care costs.

Recently, a Gateway headline on these opinion pages read “Health care issue is the government’s problem.” The writer insists the government actually caused the problem. He used two classic ploys to shrug off other people’s health care emergencies: One, the problem is really a myth and government should get out of the way of business (you know, for-profit hospitals and insurance companies); and two, the problem is mostly due to “illegals” among us (you know, foreigners, the kind of people whose troubles we can ignore).

That writer might want to shrug off my lack of health insurance for the past eight years, too.

After teaching in Mexico for three years and enjoying fine health care coverage there, my husband and I returned to discover we had lost access to group insurance with other retired school district employees. So we searched for companies that would take us on as individuals. I think we found two.

We were astounded at the high premiums, but not only that. An individual policy can be canceled at any time, for any reason (first and foremost would be our actually needing a payout), and our premiums could be raised any time at the company’s whim.

For more than 55 years of our lives, we had paid far more in premiums than we withdrew. (No matter, I’ll take good health any day.) We were willing to continue paying our share but unwilling that our premiums be used to pay for shareholder dividends, bloated bonuses, TV ads or lobbyists.

We want our premiums to pay for someone’s actual health care.

So we gambled on our good health and paid cash for all our doctor visits. Paying up front worked for us, but it was a dangerous gamble. One serious accident or illness and our emergency could lose us house and home, perhaps leaving us depending on government programs.

In extremity, our emergency could have become yours.

Paying into a “public option” insurance policy would have worked perfectly for us. Now we’ve got one — Medicare.

Fear rather than compassion drives the current debate. Raising the specter of soul-less government bureaucrats making personal health care decisions (as opposed to the benign, profit-motivated insurance company), and tying reform to the sensitive anti-abortion issue (the soul-less bureaucrat must, however, regulate a pregnant woman’s choice of medical treatments) is contradictory but effective.

I fear that the argument will dissolve into a dispute between those who currently face an emergency and those who do not. I fear we will allow this issue to pit the healthy against the sick, the young against the old, the wealthy against the poor, the establishment against the immigrant.

Will we say to each other, “Sorry, your emergency is not mine?”

I believe the time of self-sufficiency — “I’ll handle my own emergency, thank you” — is long gone. Our country has grown much too populous to ignore those facing dire circumstances.

Like it or not, we need each other.

Like it or not, our government is the only agency big and strong enough to deal with many looming emergencies.

In fact, your emergency may very possibly become mine.

Lucinda Wingard is a guest columnist for The Peninsula Gateway. She can be reached by e-mail at wingardjl@comcast.net.