Imagine my surprise, a few weeks back, to find a crowd on hand as I was wheeled into an operating room at a big regional hospital. Until that moment, it hadn’t struck me that a major procedure was at hand, though I guess you might count anything involving heart repair and general anesthesia as major. I just hadn’t expected the dozen or so physicians and nurses who were suddenly swarming my gurney. So I looked up and said, “Thank you all for being here,” not intending it to be funny, but it sounded silly, I realized -- like what you might offer at a going-away party, which I earnestly hoped this would not be.
Let me note quickly here that everything has turned out fine: The flawed aortic valve that was delivered with the rest of me seven decades back was successfully replaced, thanks to a team performing at a high level of medical science. But that morning in the operating room, and later, in my hospital bed, I was struck by the great disparity in American healthcare. I saw both sides of the coin.
First, I had the good fortune of having been monitored for 20 years by a cardiologist; then, this summer, astonishing technology enabled surgeons to easily deliver a new valve into the left chamber of my heart – which should help me avoid the early deaths of my mother and her father. It’s nearly miraculous.
Later, though, I got a different view of healthcare. I waited in vain for help when I needed a nurse. A beeper at my bedside signifying the end of a vial of intravenous medication kept beeping – but there was nobody to turn it off. I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t wait to get home.
There are so many similar stories, or much worse. Wait times for care are too long – you’ve heard of 24-hours waits, haven’t you, in emergency rooms? Hospitals are under-staffed, and low pay scales and exhaustion from Covid treatment have led many people to leave their healthcare careers.
Over the next decade, we’re likely to be 120,000 doctors short of what we need. And over the next two years alone, we’ll need at least 200,000 more nurses. Mental health services, and home care, are likewise short-staffed.
About half of U.S. adults have trouble affording healthcare. The U.S. spends more on healthcare as a share of its economy than any of the 10 other high-income countries of the world, but we have the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rate. We have the highest number of hospitalizations from preventable causes and nearly the top rate of avoidable deaths.
Yet are you hearing anything about healthcare right now from all those Republican presidential candidates? No, you are not. And is this something drawing a lot of attention in the Biden administration? Seemingly, it is not.
In fact, there hasn’t been any major healthcare legislation since Barack Obama pushed through the Affordable Care Act in 2010. During the Trump administration, Republicans talked a lot about killing Obamacare, although they had no alternative – that is, beyond just stripping healthcare from 35 million Americans. They fell just short in the Senate, fortunately.
The lack of political response to a policy crisis in healthcare is a reality because political campaigns are more about acting than achieving. When you’re running for office, some issues, like healthcare, are better to talk about than do anything about once you’re elected.
The same goes for immigration, crime and the ready availability of firearms. Those issues present tough challenges to solve, but solutions don’t get people elected. Voters, after all, find it more fun to cheer or whine about partisan playacting than to really consider where we might find common ground.
It's not that all politicians lack the courage to step forward with solutions to the big issues of the day – but it is rare enough that John F. Kennedy wrote a book about it, the classic Profiles in Courage. “To be courageous,” Kennedy wrote, “requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance.”
Right. It requires only a moral foundation and a determination to make a difference in American society. That’s what we should expect of everybody who puts themselves on a ballot. It sounds hopelessly naive just now, though, doesn’t it?
Long at the heart of American democracy, courage seems to have mostly gone missing in recent years. In the face of intractable challenges on such issues as healthcare, we won’t find solutions without courageous work by our leaders. Those who are willing to display that kind of effort in office are like that crowd of healthcare professionals around me in the operating room those weeks ago. They deserve our thanks – because what they do can help us heal.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.