Struggle for Americans to get health care is a national disgrace

This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 26, 2019

The terrain darkened as I drove the rural back roads of Georgia, red clay lining the sandy soil, deep-green kudzu choking trees and climbing telephone poles; the highway transformed into bumpy roads wearing worn-out street signs. It was summer 1985, and I was driving to see Mamie, a part-time nanny who’d helped raise me as a child. I barely knew about her own life back then, only that she lived across town, a single mom with a teenage son. I hadn’t seen her for decades.

I was now a 30-something TV reporter in Atlanta. I’d just finished a report about the “sandwich generation” — adults squeezed between caring for their children and their elderly parents — when my mom called. Mamie, she said, had moved to Georgia to care for her ailing mother.

Little did I know then that Mamie’s mother was one of 37 million Americans without health care. The idea of universal coverage wouldn’t surface until a decade later — a Clinton effort that tanked. It took another two decades before Obama signed his signature Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — into law.

Mamie was family. So, on a hot, humid Sunday, I drove west, vintage jazz on the radio. I turned off the interstate and stopped at a dilapidated roadside store. The torn screen door banged shut behind me, as ceiling fans blew a wisp of warm, muggy, air. I grabbed a bottle of cold water and asked folks standing online for directions.

After an awkward silence, a middle-aged white woman in a baggy T-shirt and faded jeans spoke up: “Y’all must be going to the black side of town.” She waved in the general direction.

As I walked out, my naiveté hit me hard. I’d grown accustomed to Atlanta politics, where most power brokers were African American: the police chief; City Council members, including civil rights legend and future Congressman John Lewis; and Mayor Andrew Young. But in the outskirts, the racial split of old emerged.

I started the car’s tired engine and drove down a dusty road flanked by sagging homes, overgrown weeds, and a spray of pines.

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Government Shutdown

Political columnist Charles P. Pierce aptly blames the government shutdown on a single House of Congress, which he describes as “a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory” than any other in the history of the U.S.

The Esquire pundit slams the House for shutting down the federal government “because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it.”

He calls Congress an “ungovernable collection of snake-handlers.” I think he nailed it.