Christian Leftist

Want to know the difference between socialized health care in France and privatized health care in the U.S.? France screws you after you turn 65; the U.S. screws you until you turn 65.

My family received an email a couple of days ago which said that my grandmother is now completely dependent on my uncle and therefore cannot live in her apartment any longer. His family has to do what is sadly the only option left to middle- and lower-class citizens with an elderly parent: send them to a nursing home. The French government isn’t going to grant her their equivalent of Medicare until all of her children AND grandchildren submit their financial histories to them. Read: me and my brother, who is barely old enough to vote, are supposed to tell a foreign company how much we make off of Ebay because they expect us to pay until we bleed before it will consider giving her financial assistance.

Apparently, France expects its young to provide for both themselves, their own families and their parents simultaneously. I suppose it might be easier to do so if we had the luxury of job security and free health care for everyone under 65 like they do. You see, one of the many reasons why unemployment is so high in France is that employers are legally prohibited from firing most of their employees unless rare and critical requirements occur (at least , this is the impression I formed after the riots last spring over proposed changes to the rules left thousands of burnt-out cars in their wake). We here in the U.S.A. lose our jobs for reasons as obtuse as disclosing a keyword we use at a marketing firm or as petty as forgetting to tuck in one’s shirt at Blockbuster. Decent health care here is rapidly becoming as elusive to most of the country as a college education. So excuse me, Monsieur, if I sniff at the notion of paying for a service that should be entirely government-subsidized, no questions asked. Not that we’re any better off here until we receive our Social Security checks, mind you, and that won’t be a sure thing after the baby boomers wreak havoc on our economy, but for now it’s a decent system.

I was a little tetchy after hearing the news, especially since my other grandmother died less than three months ago, and the average patient at an American nursing home or hospice lives less than a year after their admittance. (My advice to those of you with folks in the ‘retirement centers’ — make sure they’re kept well-hydrated. Everything functions better with a healthy amount to fluids in the system, and it’s so ridiculously easy for nurses to overlook it until a patient’s organs start to fail.) So when I saw an article by Gary Rotstein on a study’s recommendations that home health care be funded the same way nursing home care is, I was all ears.

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reports, in summary, that efforts to fund home care have been insufficicient. Other states have made home care an entitlement if the senior has qualified for Medicaid and paid down his/her assets. It’s an extremely brief article, musch like any other candid conversation about why health care in America needs to be accessible to every citizen.