DEATH BY POLITICIANS
by Roldo Bartimole
January 10th, 2017
Photo used courtesy of Scene.
He’s a nice guy. He’s earnest. He’s honest for a politician. He’s likely a good family man. He’s competent. He’s reliable. Don’t think he’d purposely do anyone a wrong. A stand-up guy.
But he’s going to KILL someone.
He’s a Republican Senator. Rob Portman. Of Ohio.
He’ll vote with the gang.
The gang wants to kill so-called Obamacare. It insures many people who cannot get medical coverage ANY OTHER WAY.
They want to kill it bad.
So that reminds me of a man I knew. I couldn’t call him a friend but maybe I could. He’s gone.
He’s gone because in 2008 he didn’t have any medical insurance.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed the U. S. Senate Dec. 24, 2009. It became law in 2010.
His name was Ed Hauser. He was one of the good guys.
He died some months before he could have gotten coverage along with millions of other Americans.
It’s the federal act Republicans want to kill. And Sen. Rob Portman will help.
Hauser death, I wrote back in December 2008 “was a tragedy that didn’t have to happen.”
In many other countries, I wrote about Ed, “It would not have happened,” and continued: “Ed died because America doesn’t have the decency to protect its own citizens with the health care that’s basic in all other industrial societies.”
I know he shouldn’t have died because he died on the way to the hospital. They called it: “Heart attack.”
He had been delaying care because he didn’t have coverage, except for catastrophic care, his friend Cathy Stahurski told me. She drove him to the hospital that day.
She felt he didn’t want to seek help because he didn’t have insurance coverage. And he was unemployed at the time.
Hauser had been an electric engineer but had been laid off a decade before from LTV Steel. He had been working temporary jobs but at the time of his death he wasn’t employed.
He didn’t just sit home.
Ed had become a civic activist. You’d see him at meetings with his video camera, watch-dogging public bodies. He was a Citizen.
One of his causes was Whiskey Island. He took people there, including me, to see what should be saved if only citizens would pay attention.
People called him “Mayor of Whiskey Island.” It’s really a peninsula at the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie.
Michael Roberts wrote in Cleveland Magazine: “Hauser is a pain—a persistent, nagging, unyielding pain. On the medical scale of one to 10, he would rate a 19. What makes him so painful is that he challenges the way the town and its dysfunctional government work.”
Ed Hauser waited too long for medical care because he couldn’t pay for it and had no insurance.
There was no Obamacare at the time.
He was a casualty of our government’s lack of concern.
It took a lot to pass the health care bill. Even though it was modeled after the Massachusetts bill passed under Mitt Romney. Remember him? He was a Republican.
Only Democrats in the Senate voted for the bill. Republicans have been playing a political game ever since. Telling citizens they would kill Obamacare and replace it with something better.
But everyone knows, including Sen. Portman, that they have no better replacement and if they had they wouldn’t pass it.
So Sen. Portman will kill some unknown Ed Hauser if he votes to kill the health care bill. And he will.
It’s as simple as that.
Death by politician.
