To the editor:
On Monday, Feb. 21, I joined friends from the Whidbey Island Quaker group in a visit to our legislators in Olympia to talk to them about proposed cuts to a number of state social programs. Most of these friends do not know that my wife and I will be directly affected by the proposed ending of one of these programs, the state Basic Health program that subsidizes the health insurance payments of lower income people.
Friends do not know that we receive healthcare through this program because we are somewhat embarrassed at receiving public assistance. Could we have done more to obtain steady, well-paid, full-time work that would have provided us with medical insurance? Perhaps my wife should have kept her technical work skills more up to date so that she would not have had to try and play a kind of catch up in her early sixties. I could have taken my specialized Ph.D. credentials on the road, so to speak, and been more willing to go wherever in the world I was wanted instead of settling on part-time contract labor at a distance for an international educational organization.
At the same time I am proud of and pleased for friends and family members who have been more successful. These include a multi-millionaire businessman older brother and a tenured professor and world class performing artist younger brother. My older brother is almost becoming a bionic man with all of his replaced joints and vertebrae. I consider this one of his just rewards for a lifetime of hard work. However, denying access to basic healthcare to those of us who have not been so successful makes no sense.
Some years ago, before the Basic Health program existed, I saw firsthand some of the negative effects of a lack of such a program when I was taking EMT training as part of the local volunteer fire department. When we spent a day at the hospital emergency services center I expected to mainly see people with injuries from a variety of mishaps, but instead I saw uninsured people in need of expensive emergency treatment for conditions that might have been dealt with through routine preventive care.
Now the governor and members of the state Legislature are saying that a number of programs that give lower income children and adults access to certain health, education and social welfare benefits are luxuries that we as a society can no longer afford. The state simply doesn’t have the money to pay for them. However, an emergency room visit is, perhaps, 10 times more expensive than a medical clinic visit. A year’s stay in a state prison is several times more expensive than a year at a state university. It takes nearly a million dollars to put a young soldier on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq. So, whether it be preventive health care, preventive diplomacy, or an early intervention head start education program, an ounce of preventive measures avoids a pound of later cure.
Our society may be spending more than the rest of the world combined on military defense, we imprison more people than any society on earth, and irresponsible bankers seem to receive immediate public assistance. Yet, we seem quite willing to cut public funding of social programs that clearly save us all a good deal of money and grief in the long run. It simply makes no sense.
Michael Seraphinoff
Greenbank
