My Own Private Sicko

Chris Corbell

[Editor's note: Today, Chris Corbell joins us as a regular contributor. Chris describes himself as "a software engineer, a father, a Democrat, and a politically unambitious citizen blogger."]

Michael Moore's film Sicko was effective in advocating for a better health system largely because it presented the stories of everyday Americans.  Over a decade ago the Oregon Health Plan gave me the first health coverage of my adult life, an experience which shifted my worldview, and which also affects my choice in this year's Presidential race.

In 1991 in New Orleans I was working as a cook/bar-back for minimum wage when I came down with what was probably some strain of pneumonia. I kept working through this illness (my boss demanded it), weak and wheezing, and as it kept getting worse I used a day off to try and get treatment at the public Charity Hospital which served low-income patients. The waiting room was packed and after three or four delirious hours I gave up. I ended up going to some random M.D.'s office near my house - it wasn't a general practice office but I managed to get a cursory exam and a prescription for antibiotics - all of which set me back two week's wages, or about a month's rent.

That wasn't the only time I faced illness without health insurance, and I know many people have faced much worse. As a young adult in Louisiana (and Tennessee before that) health care seemed to me like a racket that you could only be part of in a privileged caste. It went along with country club golf, five-bedroom homes and brand new cars. After I dropped out of college for lack of money (while Reagan was still in office), I started smoking and later drinking heavily. With Bohemian passion and disdain I embraced my lot with the damned, forswearing the notion that I would ever have the safety net or perfect health that I imagined belonged to the shiny happy children of privilege. After a few years of such nihilistic smoldering amid piles of used books, I moved to Oregon.

After living and working here a year I applied for the Oregon Health Plan and, for the first time in my adult life, had health insurance. With a simple enrollment in OHP I could go to the doctor and it would cost me at most a half-day's wages. Under the OHP I even got glasses for the first time since I was about 10; with mock-Trotskyite relish I told a friend how the optician pulled an unmarked box of "state frames" from under a table, from which I chose my new spectacles. The gradual change this worked in me is difficult to completely attribute to one cause, but out of this experience - which also included a higher minimum wage in Oregon, and better student aid as I returned to college under the Clinton administration - I took responsibility for myself, and for my health. It took time but once I had just a little help I didn't feel so doomed, and out of gratitude began to have more drive to succeed, to give something back. In 1995 the Oregon Health Plan was part of this change, as I found a way past a self-destructive and maudlin sympathy for the devil to a healthier sympathy for the normal.

The OHP is not what it was in those early years. After being shut down to new enrollment in 2004, it is now a lottery, and from 600,000 uninsured, 80,000 people have applied, and just a few thousand of those applicants will get covered this year. Back in New Orleans, Charity Hospital's future is in question, and I wonder how many of those I left in that waiting room made it through their illnesses, and through Hurricane Katrina. I'm fortunate now to be healthy (smoke-free!) and have employer-provided health insurance, but many Oregonians - and a great many more throughout our nation - do not have this advantage. Every day, people face scenarios far more dangerous and costly than my Acadian summer pneumonia.

Health care is a major reason that I'm supporting Hillary Clinton for President in 2008. I did not fully understand in the early 1990's what was at stake in Hillary's first fight for universal health care; I was too cynical to believe it would come to pass, so it was just another thing on TV to shrug knowingly about from my barstool when the powers that be shut her effort down with Harry and Louise. But that was before I had experienced life in a supportive, progressive state of Oregon.

Hillary Clinton knows better than anyone what's at stake here.  That's why she is not starting out yielding ground to the right by omitting a universal mandate. She began this struggle 15 years ago, and she has built her knowledge and political clout continuously. Any of us who have tried to make modest changes in our own local companies and institutions know how hard it is. This is not a fact of Washington politics, it is a fact of every human institution: the race to truly change how things work is not a sprint, it is a marathon. When I look at Hillary's successes with SCHIP, her Senate office's ongoing research and legislation, and when I look at the way she surprised Republicans by her humility, her approachability, and her work ethic in her seven years in the Senate, I see proof of true, results-oriented leadership. Here is a woman who has the maturity and the deep, evolving commitment to this issue that will be required to get the job done.

I will always strive to give back to Oregon in thanks for the stepping-stone to health and a brighter future that this state gave me when I moved here in that heyday of state public health. And this year I will try to give back even more, not just to Oregon but to Louisiana and Tennessee and every state where folks struggle like I did, by continuing to support Hillary Clinton's campaign for President - and by casting my ballot for her in Oregon's primary on May 20.

By Chris Corbell March 07, 2008