I have to say it again?
The short version is that my wife, Ms T
to those who know us not and those who know us know her name, is
sick. Without a high-profile fund-raising disease to provide support,
our entire experience of critical illness is of the public system.
And while I complain about details, the
key facts are: she's still alive, and we're not broke.
Over the last four years, she's spent
about five months in hospital, had one very major surgery plus about
ten minor procedures (including removal of two tumours that were
side-effects of her treatments), run into her third year of
immune-suppressing chemotherapy, vast amounts of various medications,
and right now, pain clinic access to try and eliminate her dependency
on synthetic opioids.
A US friend of mine tracked things
early on, but he gave up when her putative American healthcare bill
passed the million-dollar-mark.
But the happy-clappers of prosperity
doctrine really hate things like Medicare. It's a direct challenge
to their fundamental doctrine: if you're poor, it's because God
doesn't love you, and if you're poor because of disease, it's because
you have personally and individually offended God and are being
punished.
Which is a religious stance that suits
the most atheistic of economic schools – the hard market
fundamentalists – just fine, because they detest government
spending as a matter of principle.
And it's created a most toxic and
potent combination that's infecting Australia from its spiritual home
in America, and every damn government institution is under attack.
Yes, there's SPC Ardmona and the sickening support for mining
billionaires and the ABC and SBS, education funding and disability
funding …
But my personal angle is personal,
okay? I can and do care about the other things, but I write about
what I know.
In America, Ms T and I would be yet
another case of medical bankruptcy. Instead, I have both an employer
and a small business, one son has a university record that makes me
swell with pride and the other is about to enter the workforce. And
we didn't have to sell everything, retreat to a trailer park, declare
bankruptcy, or seek income support from the government.
And right now, the prognosis for Ms T
is better than it's been since 2010, whereas under the American
system, I'd have scattered petals on her coffin long ago.
You had one job, electorate of
Australia, and you did it wrong. With any number of people warning
you that gimlet-eyed ideologues wanted power and would abuse it from
Day One, you decided that “an Abbott government couldn't be that
bad”.
You were wrong, and with years still to
go, protest – huge, ongoing, mass protest – seems to be the only
way to defend Australia against the US-inspired mission teams of the
Tea Party.
