Kennedycare
Why do they call it Obamacare? And why the perjorative tone?
Why not Kennedycare?
You may have read Kennedy’s letter to Obama.
It was the cause of Kennedy’s life, stretching over many decades.
Can you imagine what it is like to live in a country that has free medical care? Where you aren’t held hostage by the extortionist triumvirate of doctor, insurance company and pharmaceutical companies? The top priority of these entities is not your good health.
Can you imagine what it is like to have the gynacologist assure you that your child is perfectly healthy, even though you have just been told that he has a birth defect?
How many sad hours do you think I spent in the university library with my growing belly researching cleft lip and cleft gum and looking at gruesome photos of miserable, screaming babies with cleft lips?
I met with nurses and doctors at a special institute in my final trimester. All paid for by the state. A parent had made a photo album and the baby looked cute. That was such a relief. My fear was that the child would be so ugly that I would be repelled by him. Then, when he was actually born, I felt sorry for the other mothers in the hospital because their babies weren’t as beautiful as mine. No matter that his lip was cleft or that his nose was skewed, his eyes were limpid pools of indescribable beauty.
My child had to have a drain inserted in his collapsed lung and was in the neo-natal ward for a few days. He recovered quickly. The surgeries began when he was ten weeks old, first with the lip. The radial lip muscles begin to develop after this time so the lip surgery to sew the lip pieces together and match the vermillion had to be done very early. They call it the 10/10/10 rule: 10 weeks old, 10 pounds minimum weight and a third 10 that I don’t recall.
He had had problems with his ears and has had Grommitz drains inserted on two occasions.
He has had bone tissue transplant surgery five years ago and will have rhinoplasty to fix his nose when he is about 20.
All paid for the Danish health service.
All of this type of work is highly coordinated, from the specially-trained district nurse who is familiar with the challenges of this issue (frequent ear trouble, for example) to the two surgeons and their dedicated team of operating theatre nurses.
In other countries, you can risk having a (I won’t say it Todd Brison but this is the place for it, if any) proctologist sew your child’s lip in place. Until about fifty years ago, any surgeon could do the work and some of them made a right dog’s dinner out of it. Nobody under fifty in this country has a cleft lip that is noticeable after a cursory glance, the two-surgeon team is that good. They put 500 individual stitches in my 10-week-old baby’s upper lip. You can barely see a little white line and only if you look very carefully. They even travelled abroad to perform these operations and train similar teams in other countries.
Now he’s old enough to attend the appointments at the clinic alone. Even though this is a capital city, the crime rate is low and the streets are safe, even at night. He’s had a dental brace for about two years and soon he’s going to be fitted for a palate brace again.
If I had to pay for this privately I would be bankrupted.
I would have had to deny my son the surgeries or the dental care I couldn’t afford, I would have to pick and choose which ones I could afford or worse, purchase a budget version.
Right now I know he’s getting the best medical care that money can buy in the world.
Can you imagine how much peace that gives me as a parent?
I NEVER have to think about expense when my children are ill. I never have to think about the cost of a doctor’s visit when I am ill. I never have to think twice about cost when I get referred to a medical specialist. With three sons there’s always something: astmatic bronchitis, eczema, a minor heart defect, childhood accidents, A&E… one Christmas Eve when my twins were two years old, one of them slipped on the ice and split his eyebrow. My sister-in-law was a nurse and patched him up after which I promptly fainted. What a Christmas.
Another time he gets a fishbone stuck in his throat. The ambulance was on its way in a few minutes. Plus all the fevers and coughs and tummy bugs.
When my twins were born there were two of everyone, two midwives, two obstetricians, two pædiatricians, oh, yes, and two babies. Can you imagine what it would cost if I had to pay them privately and the meter was running? They were in an incubator for an hour after they were born. That costs money too.
Unlike Chelsea and Ivanka, none of my sons dropped out of a Jackpot Vagina:
Peace of mind regarding my family’s health is priceless.
My children were lucky enough to drop into a jackpot country with jackpot health care.
My jackpot government, in this country of which I am now a citizen, gives me that peace of mind.
May your country someday give you that jackpot too.
I want it for you.
Obama wants it for you.
Kennedy wanted it for you. It was his dying wish expressed in his letter to Obama.
It was his gift back to the American people who had loved him and his family so well and so long.
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The White House, Dr. Jill Biden, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Andrew Weil, M.D., Dr Annabel Bentley, Doctors Without Borders, Bryan Vartabedian,
