When President Barack Obama gave his health care address last week, Nathan Wilkes — the Englewood father of a six-year old boy who suffers a rare blood disorder — was anxiously sitting two rows behind First Lady Michelle Obama.
Wilkes’ son, Thomas, requires a daily dose of medicine to stay alive. The family has gone through several insurers that have deemed Thomas’ treatment too costly to pay for. As a result of his experiences with the insurance industry, Wilkes said he has become involved in promoting the controversial public option.
“When you’re talking about health care it’s a life and death issue,” he said. “To have profiteers in the middle trying to make money off the situation doesn’t work out.”
But many Republicans have fought the push for a single-payer system at every step. Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, said last month that the public option would create a slippery slope to a government-controlled, single-payer system.
Denver resident Andrew Ward agrees. Joining fellow opponents in a protest outside the Stout Street Clinic early last month, Ward said he does not want his government controlling health care.
“I don’t want the government — the big federal government that can’t run Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and can’t decide if they’re going to raise our taxes — I don’t want them running my health care system,” he said.
To all the opponents of the public option and health care reform in general, Wilkes says this: His story could happen to anyone. Before Thomas was born, he and his family had the “gold-plated Cadillac” of insurances. But soon after Thomas started getting treatment, his insurance company was soon trying to put a cap on his claims to essentially kick him off the insurance roles, he said.
Wilson and his wife then considered getting a divorce so they could get Thomas on Medicaid. They ended up deciding against it, though, so Wilson quit his job, took a pay cut and started his own business so he could get insurance as an employer.
“I could go on for hours talking about the crazy things the insurance companies did — many of them borderline illegal and definitely immoral — to delay payment, deny care and force us to pay more,” he said. “Until you live it, you really have no idea how bad it can be.”
While Wilkes said he was glad to see Obama’s speech in person and thought the president made many good points, he didn’t think it was a game changer. Nothing Obama said was anything that hadn’t been said before in some form or another, he said.
“I was hoping to see a go out there and get it done type of speech you’d expect to hear from a Roosevelt or a Kennedy,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of the town hall meetings and some legislators spreading lies, he had to play the part of the parent in the front seat telling the kids in the back to knock it off.”
He added that he was shocked by the childish and disrespectful behavior that some lawmakers showed during Obama’s speech. When Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouted “You lie” as Obama was saying that his plan would not insure illegal immigrants, it was much louder and more appalling than many videos made it out to be, according to Wilkes.
Wilkes, who was sitting close to the Republicans during the speech, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, immediately turned around to Wilson after the outburst and “gave him a dirty look as only John McCain can.”
“When both sides are looking at you like, ‘What the heck is the matter with you?’ it’s disturbing,” said Wilson.
For his part, Wilson afterwards apologized to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. However, Reuters reported that the lawmaker is still voicing concern that illegal immigrants could gain coverage under some of the health care proposals.
“I think this is wrong,” Reuters reported Wilson as saying. “We need to be discussing issues specifically to help the American people and that would not include illegal aliens.”
