Fight for Health Care Reform Is Personal

If my late father were the same guy today that he was in the 1970s — with the same factory job, the same wife and four kids — there's a chance I would not live to see my 21st birthday.

The difference is all about health care.

The memory of my first asthma attack remains vivid as the defining moment when the Connie who used to be became the Connie I am to this day.

I remember the hours leading up to it, when I couldn't stop coughing, couldn't quite catch my breath. Mom felt my forehead and said maybe I should stay home that night. It was the dead of winter in the Snowbelt, but I had a 16-year-old's priorities. I was a cheerleader, and we were playing our biggest rival in basketball.

I dressed for that night's game, sweating and heart pounding as I paused to catch my breath after each movement — pulling on my cheerleading sweater, zipping my skirt, tying my shoes.

I remember the other girls on the squad looking at me with increasing alarm as I kept sitting down to lean forward and gasp for air. We were performing "Fight, Team, Fight" during a timeout, when I dropped to my knees in the middle of the gymnasium. I have no memory of who drove me to the emergency room.

Over the next four years, I was hospitalized at least a dozen times — twice after arriving by ambulance. Twice, doctors told my parents that I nearly had died.

When our family doctor said I needed a specialist, my father used vacation days to drive me an hour away to the Cleveland Clinic for tests, treatments and clinical trials. One winter during college, my asthma was so bad that I could not walk, even to the campus bus stop, without gasping for air.

When a doctor suggested I use a wheelchair "just for a while," I dropped out for the semester.

It took several years — and tens of thousands of dollars in medical care and prescriptions — to get my asthma under control. Virtually all of my care was covered by my father's union benefits. My doctor told me that after he ordered me back into the hospital for the umpteenth time and I burst into tears.

I said I was sure my parents could not afford to pay any more of my medical bills.

The doctor closed the door, took my hand and gently explained that my dad had the best health care coverage in the world. I was a union member's kid; I always knew that. But that was the first time anyone explained why the privilege of my father's union membership mattered to my life.

In 1981, two years after I graduated from college, only 8 percent of families filed for bankruptcy after serious medical problems. Those days are long gone.

A recent study by Harvard and Ohio universities showed that 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies between 2001 and 2007 had medical causes. That's a 50 percent increase from the year 2000. Most of the medical debtors were "well-educated and middle-class; three-quarters had health insurance."

What more evidence do we need that America's health care system is broken?

John Mackey — the CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., with its trendy, upscale groceries — argued in an op-ed last week in The Wall Street Journal that most health care problems are "self-inflicted" by fat Americans who don't eat right. His essential question: Whoever said everyone deserves health care?

"Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care — to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals," he wrote. "While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?"

I read those words and see my father — the factory worker with the chronically sick kid, the guy who never could afford the lean meats and organic produce at Whole Foods. It's hard to think families like ours would make the cut in John Mackey's equation of exemptions.

My support for health care reform? It's personal.

I'm grateful to have lived long enough to tell you why.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "... and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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