Recently, my mother and I went to the Senate building to meet with our senator. We were able to talk to his aid for quite some time. Some of the things that she said were great, and others really disturbed me.
She said that Senator Micheal Bennet (D-CO) is for allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines. That is awesome. I agree and this should be an essential part of the bill. What worries me about this is, what leverage does he now have? He has already stated that he is in the tank, no matter what this bill has in it.
Can he really fight for that kind of an amendment after saying that? When he goes to Harry Reid and says, “I want insurance companies to be able to sell across state lines.” Mr. Reid would say “I already have your vote, so shut up.”
Don’t get me wrong, I like people with conviction. I actually really respect that he said that, and that he has the conviction to say it. I believe that the founding fathers set up our government as a republic and not a democracy for a reason, and we need more representatives that are willing to stand up for their principles. The problem I have with it, is that he just lost any negotiating power that he had.
She also talked about a new insurance plan that would be administered by the government but would be run by private companies. I don’t really know how I feel about that. On the one hand it is still too much government. On the other, there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and my mom who works in the industry said that there are other examples of this plan that have worked really well. OK, like I said I don’t know, but again what bargaining chips does he have?
Then she threw out some “facts” that really trouble me.
1) She said that there are 50,000 people that die every year in America because they don’t have health insurance, and that is worse than any other industrialized country in the world.
2) She said that the Infant mortality rate is higher in America than any other country with a public option or government run health care.
Well number 1 kinda threw me off and I didn’t know how to respond to it until I left. I knew that it was a lie, but I for some reason it just did not click what a dumb comment it was. How can you come up with a number like that? Are you counting people that get hit by a bus and did not have health care, or are you only counting people with long term diseases that cannot be handled in an emergency room (because those would already be covered) such as cancer or heart disease. If you are really only counting those people then it is still comparing apples to oranges, because in countries with single payer systems the people are covered but they cannot get the expensive life saving drugs and surgeries. I guess you would compare it to the number of people that die due having death panels in other countries?
I knew how to counter number 2. I said “the WHO has different ways to count infant deaths in each country”.
She said “No they don’t, I worked for the WHO and they count them all the same.”
How could I argue with that when I didn’t have the actual data in front of me? So, I just said “I know that is a disingenuous statement.”
Now I have looked it up. We know for a fact that not all nations count the infant mortality rate the same. In the United States, we use the WHO definition:
Live birth refers to the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy, which, after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life – e.g. beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles – whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached. Each product of such a birth is considered live born.
In Europe, for example, they use a different definition: [see page 122]
The infant mortality rate is defined as the number of infant deaths (days 0-364) after live birth at or after 22 completed weeks of gestation in a given year, expressed per 1000 live births in the same year.
And yet, even this definition is not standard across the European Countries: [see page 122]
Almost all countries provided data on overall infant mortality rates. However, many fewer were able to provide data on infant mortality rates by gestational age or birth weight, since infant deaths are registered in separate systems and not linked to perinatal data. These data were available for gestational age only from Flanders and Brussels in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Austria, Poland, Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Norway.
Here is another great article about the topic, and here is an excerpt that I think sums it up pretty well:
Forty percent of all infant deaths occur in the first 24 hours of life.In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth (take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered alive.
If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a “miscarriage” and does not affect the country’s reported infant mortality rates.
The length of pregnancy considered “normal” is 37-41 weeks. In Belgium and France — in fact, in most European Union countries — any baby born before 26 weeks gestation is not considered alive and therefore does not “count” against reported infant mortality rates.
Too short to count?
In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby born who is less than 30 centimeters long is not counted as a live birth. Therefore, unlike in the U.S., such high-risk infants cannot affect Swiss infant mortality rates.
Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since 2000, 42 of the world’s 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.
The parents of these children may view socialized medicine somewhat differently than its proponents.
During this meeting I told her all about how I love freedom and I feel that this is a huge dive toward socialism. She was a history major so we talked about Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. How he was afraid that people could not handle the kind of freedom that the other founding fathers were talking about. This made everyone in the country pull together and start proving that they could. There became an air of brotherly love. Service to others was on everyone’s mind. This became such a nice country that clergy around the world were talking about it. So, my question was “What can we do as Coloradans to PROVE that we can handle the freedom?” She said “freedom from what?” I said “freedom from a massive government take over of healthcare which takes away so many of our freedoms.” She said “that is a matter of opinion, service is good but this needs to happen.”
My mom and me also forgot about the two biggest things on our minds. I don’t know how. We forgot about this paying for abortions and illegals. Those should have been the whole theme of our being there, and we forgot.
Oh well.
All in all I think that we did part of our civic duty, and I think that more people need to get more involved.
