Stop your whining and get back to work

For those dismayed at John Kerry’s loss to George Bush last Tuesday, I have this healing message: Get over it, stop your whining and get back to work. We need you too much for you to waste time pouting and cursing just because 57 million Americans voted the wrong way. Besides, if Kerry and the Red Sox had both won their respective races, Red Sox fans who supported Kerry would have keeled over in joy, their hearts unable to take the excitement. If only one of them could win we would have picked the Red Sox anyway; after all, the presidential race was only about the country’s future.

Like a doc in the emergency department whose last patient just told him where to stick his stethoscope, Kerry supporters have to move on. Our president, George W. Bush – you may wince now but this is the last time – is going to need our help and guidance on the many health care issues that will confront him. If we flip him the flying feathered creature and head for Canada in frustration he will be left to his own remedies for health care policy issues. We cannot let that happen.

Where does he need our help? First, President Bush needs help addressing the fact that 45 million Americans at any one time lack health insurance, even though 40 million of those have jobs. That’s the main reason health care bills are the most common cause of bankruptcy in America. Bush’s plan to help the uninsured has been estimated by health care policy experts to provide health insurance for perhaps 12 million of those 45 million Americans. As coverage goes, the Bush plan is a jock strap.

The president also needs our help understanding that his proposed health savings accounts (HSAs), whereby people get a tax break for putting money aside to pay for health care costs, do nothing to help control health care costs. HSAs simply make it a little less painful to have more health care costs shifted from the employer to the employee, or to help the uninsured pay for health care bills they have to bear alone because they have no health care insurance. HSAs are mittens in a cold home when what is really needed is a furnace that works.

We also need to hold GW’s hand through revisions of the new Medicare prescription drug law. It is so twisted and confusing it looks like a legislative plate of spaghetti. Surveys of Medicare recipients have found that many of them cannot understand how to use the benefits the new law is supposed to give them. Worst of all, it does nothing to rein in rising prescription drug costs; it just makes it a little more comfortable for all of us to pay them, similar to HSAs.

In fact, sugar coating the bitter pill of the patient’s growing share of rising health care costs, instead of controlling those cost increases or insuring us all against them, is beginning to look like the president’s principal health care policy. We need to help him understand that pill is making us gag.

On the issue of rising prescription drug costs, it would be helpful to him if we could get President Bush to act more like the CEO of America and less like the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. His administration has resisted most efforts to pass any of the pharmacopeia of remedies available to rein in runaway prescription drug costs. It has, for example, resisted re-importation of prescription drugs from Canada, arguing those medications may not be safe. That argument is so thin you would be arrested for wearing it at the beach, as evidenced by the recent efforts of the administration to re-import influenza vaccine from Canada. Little has been done to increase availability of cheaper generic drugs, or to limit expensive prescription drug advertising directly to the public.

Finally, we must all help the president face the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare, a financial train without its engineer headed our way that both he and Kerry tried desperately to ignore during the campaign. In fact, if we don’t put aside our partisan misery and bickering and help our leaders make the tough decisions necessary to restore solvency to these two programs we are all just sitting together in the tracks. There is no excuse for any of us not to get behind Bush and future presidents on this issue, no matter what party they represent. No president, no politician, will dare to address this unless we make them, and permit them, to do that. Our failure to do so ought to embarrass us every time we sit down to dinner with our children, who will suffer the consequences of our failure.

So, I congratulate the 57 million fellow Americans who elected President Bush to another term, and I no longer wonder what you were smoking when you voted. To my fellow Kerry supporters I say stop your whining, pull down your signs, pick up your chins and get back in the game. This is one country, there is one president and he needs our help to make sure he gets the job done right.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.