Will Medicare Reform Encourage Seniors to Become more Responsible for their Health?

Will Medicare Reform Encourage Seniors to Become more Responsible for their Health?
by Mary Mostert, Publisher, Banner of Liberty

December 4, 2003

Columnist Mary Mostert The angry debate over the Republican Medicare Reform bill, which the President will sign into law on Monday has been interesting to me, as a senior who will be naturally affected by it, but almost all the discussion on it, pro and con, has I think totally missed the most important part of the story, which is: We are all responsible for our own Health Care and need to make daily decisions on how we keep our health.

Now, Sick Care is a different issue. When you need Sick Care, it is a good idea to locate a good doctor and follow their advice.

In my youth, growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I never ever saw the insides of a doctor's office. We were too poor and so the only doctor I ever knew was my mother who tried her very best to provide the best health care available to her by growing a garden and teaching us the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables and not pigging out on sweets. She got quite upset with us when she discovered my brothers had found some leftover tobacco in a shed and made cigarettes out of it for us to smoke.

It was well known back in the 1930s, long before a law was passed forcing tobacco companies to place warnings on their products, that tobacco was bad for your health.

When my own six children were growing up, they were taken to a pediatrician for sick care, but they had to cope with me in matters of health care. I didn't allow them to eat candy, except on rare occasions such as Halloween, and they ate whole wheat homemade bread because I was aware that no self-respecting weevil would touch white flour since it had few nutrients.

A few days ago, while discussing the new Medicare bill with my doctor son, he said something that surprised me. "Mom, you were a generation ahead of everyone else on this nutrition business and its importance in staying healthy."

I thought of that when I read comments made on the floor of Congress both in support of and opposed to H.R. 1, the Medicare Reform Bill. This issue of who is responsible caring for one's health was actually barely mentioned. We have become a culture that thinks doctors are responsible for our health, rather than ourselves. Republican Joe Wilson of South Carolina almost touched on the issue when he said, in favor of H.R. 1 that it was:

"an historic bill that will include the creation of health savings accounts, a breakthrough program that gives control back to patients. … Health savings accounts will lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans and allow for price competition of doctor and hospital services."

Senator Ted Kennedy, Democrat from Massachusetts, on the other hand, opposed the bill using as his key reason an article in a Boston paper quoting Quy Nguyen, 71 who said "Because of the Medicaid co-payment she limits herself to four prescriptions she needs most and tries to get by without several others."

In effect Kennedy touched on the issue - Should seniors think about whether they REALLY need all these medicines that are being prescribed, or just take them because they are free? I think giving free drugs to ANYONE, but especially people in my generation is fraught with dangers. We have become a culture that somehow equates taking 8 to 12 separate drugs a day with "health." Yet, taking that many drugs has nothing to do with health. It might have something to do with a complete LACK of health. Thanks to Medicare, there's a whole lot of drugs being consumed that didn't exist even a few years ago and that have never actually been through major test trials as to what happens to them when they land in your stomach all at the same time. How often is a person's life or even longevity saved or extended by taking 10-12 pills a day?

The question I would have, concerning the woman who only took four of her prescriptions instead of all eight of them, because she lacked money for the co-pay, is, if they were totally free, how many drugs would she take a day? 10? 12? 15? And, how many of them would actually be needed to save or extend her life?

I find, as a senior, that any drug or procedure or test that the doctor might think up for me to undertake is, as they constantly remind me, free, and it is therefore my duty to agree to have it done. "This won't cost you a penny." I know that, but my question is, "Why is this test necessary? What are you going to do about it if you find that, sure enough, I have some arthritis of the spine, which I've known about for 47 years, which resulted from a 60 year old back injury, you have discovered by this free MRI?"

Doctors and nurses tend to treat a question like that as a hostile question and quickly assure me "Don't worry! Medicare will pay for it!"

That wasn't the issue. My question was whether or not, money aside, the MRI was worth doing, medically. The answer was that they might operate on my back. So, I asked, what percentage of those operations are successful and actually would give someone my age less pain from a 60 year old injury? By then the doctor figured maybe it wasn't worth it to order the MRI. He knew, and suspected I also knew, that the success rate of that particular operation was not spectacular and was not going to restore my back to its status when I was 12 years old, before I injured it.

Even if an MRI and an operation on my back would have actually helped, is it morally defensible for me have it done, when I know my grandchildren are going to have to pay for it and it will not lengthen my life one minute?

The bill the President Bush will sign will give seniors back some of their rights to make choices. Hopefully, it will encourage more people my age to again think about their responsibilities towards the country and especially their grandchildren. Should we, as a generation, continue to burden our grandchildren's generation with more and more debt - when much of what we are getting "free" does not really lengthen, or even improve, our lives? ***

To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com

Mary Mostert was writing professionally on political issues as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she wrote a weekly column for the Rochester Times Union, a Gannett paper and was one of 52 American women who attended the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland to ban testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. She was a licensed building contractor for 29 years, as she raised her six children. She served an 18 month mission as Public Affairs Director for the Africa Area for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1990-91. In the 1990s she wrote a book, Coming Home, Families Can Stop the Unraveling of America, edited the Reagan Monthly Monitor and talk show host Michael Reagan’s Information Interchange for seven years. She now operates the website, Banner of Liberty.

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Mary Mostert is the Publisher of Banner of Liberty. You can e mail her at mmostert@bannerofliberty.com

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