Subsidizing healthcare or billionaires

It looks like the only way Congress can pay for tax cuts for billionaires is to cut spending on Medicaid and Medicare. Why? It’s like the bank robber Willie Sutton said when someone asked him why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

Just in case that’s the plan, let me tell you a story.

Sometime in 1990 a young man sat on a couch in my house and asked for help. He had a brain tumor. He was there because an older friend of his brought him and insisted that I was somebody who could help him.

I wasn’t so sure. I was in my first term as a state representative and was just feeling my way around. I didn’t yet understand the power that having a title gave to a person. Louie, the older man, did.

He knew not only that that title gave me the power to help, it also gave me the responsibility to help.

The young man worked at a local lumber mill “pulling chain” – removing and sorting boards coming off a chain conveyor at a very rapid rate. Sometimes, because of the tumor, he would black out, and the boards would come whizzing past him. His workmates covered for him during these spells and took on his share of the work until he snapped out of it and resumed working.

He had no medical insurance. He couldn’t afford it, and even if he could have afforded it, it wouldn’t have paid for the operation to remove the tumor because it was a “pre-existing condition” that no insurance company would then cover.

At that time, the only way a person who needed expensive medical care, but couldn’t pay for it, could get help was to get on a program called Social Security Disability Insurance. It usually took three years and required hiring a lawyer.

He was in a hard place. The only good news was that the tumor wasn’t cancerous and would be easy to remove. But it was still growing, and his blackouts would get worse.

I decided to call a person I knew slightly who worked for Montana’s Senator Max Baucus and ask for her advice. Holly Luck answered, and I explained the situation.

She asked to talk with the young man, so I handed him the phone, but he didn’t take it. He couldn’t take it. He had blacked out.

When he came to, I gave him Holly’s number to call. He did, and the Senator’s office quickly got him on Social Security Disability Insurance, he had the surgery and was able to go back to work as a productive part of the American workforce.

That’s the way it was before the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid Expansion. There were a lot of stories like that.

Keeping people healthy keeps them working and contributing to a healthy economy. If we want that for America, the choice between subsidizing billionaires and keeping American workers working should be pretty clear.

Montana Viewpoint has appeared in weekly and online newspapers across Montana for more than 30 years. Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.