Last night, as I sat in the Emergency Room at a quarter past midnight waiting for the nurse to come back with the discharge papers for my 6-year-old son who had a severe asthma attack, I couldn’t help but think about the speech President Obama gave back when he was candidate Obama, in which he claimed,
“Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.”
I, in my own sleep-deprived state, found that ironically humorous. See, my son has insurance. He has regular visits to the pediatrician. He’s never missed a check-up. He’s up-to-date on all of his shots. He even gets yearly flu vaccines, due to his cold-induced asthma. He has an asthma action plan. He has an inhaler.
The thing about asthma is that it is, well, unpredictable. Especially cold-induced asthma that can be worse with a really bad chest cold. And sometimes the inhaler doesn’t work, even though it did every single time over the past year and a half, since he started having asthma attacks.
The other thing is that sometimes that happens at 10 o’clock at night, when the ER is the only option.
Believe me, both of us would have preferred to be home in bed.
The point of this tale is simple: politicians are not doctors. Even a politician as intelligent and well-educated as Barak Obama doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about when it comes to why kids with asthma end up in the ER.
Politicians are not doctors.
The decisions about health care policy should not be left to politicians, who, in addition to not being doctors, inevitably end up loading the bills up with a bunch of non-health-related goodies intended to solicit votes.
I’m not afraid of “socialized medicine.” I’m not afraid of waiting lists. I don’t think the world is going to end tomorrow if we have a public option.
But, I don’t want politicians – any politicians – deciding whether or not a woman can get an abortion or the morning after pill, or whether some old guy can get Viagra, or whether my son needs to go to the ER for his “treatable illness, like asthma.”
Politicians are not doctors.
That is why I think we should leave health care out of politicians’ hands.
And, by the way, his doctor told us to go to the ER, Mr. President. I’m sorry if it cost too much.
