Health Care and Pre-Existing Conditions

I have shied away from the ongoings of the public health care debate. I deemed them too heated, too beliggerent to even give it a second thought – let it be and this too shall pass. An article on Newsweek.com that I happened to read a few moments ago, reminded me of the importance of vigilance when it comes to politics, most especially when it comes to health care. The article was about the need for the President to reframe his Health-Care debate, Obama needs to reframe health-care debate, and I quote:

“As the health-care debate rages, it’s the Party of Sort-of-Maybe-Yes versus the Party of Hell No! The Yessers are more lackadaisical because they’ve forgotten the stakes—they’ve forgotten that this is the most important civil-rights bill in a generation, though it is rarely framed that way.

The main reason that the bill isn’t sold as civil rights is that most Americans don’t believe there’s a “right” to health care. They see their rights as inalienable, and thus free, which health care isn’t. Serious illness is an abstraction (thankfully) for younger Americans. It’s something that happens to someone else, and if that someone else is older than 65, we know that Medicare will take care of it. Polls show that the 87 percent of Americans who have health insurance aren’t much interested in giving any new rights and entitlements to “them”—the uninsured.

But how about if you or someone you know loses a job and the them becomes “us”? The recession, which is thought to be harming the cause of reform, could be aiding it if the story were told with the proper sense of drama and fright. Since all versions of the pending bill ban discrimination by insurance companies against people with preexisting conditions, that provision isn’t controversial. Which means it gets little attention. Which means that the deep moral wrong that passage of this bill would remedy is somehow missing from the debate.“

“Sec. 111. Prohibiting Pre-Existing Condition Exclusions

A qualified health benefits plan may not impose any pre-existing condition exclusion (as defined in section 2701 (b) (1) (A) of the Public Health Service Act) or otherwise impose any limit or condition on the coverage under the plan with respect an individual or dependent based on any health status-related factors (as defined in section 2791 (d) (9) of the Public Health Service Act) in relation to the individual or dependent. ” – H.R. 200 (Health Care Bill as proposed by the Government on July 14, 2009).

 

In Memoriam: Tito Rico Ortanez

Coming home one afternoon, the Bee Gees’ “Words” warmly greeted my arrival. The gentle notes, the simple lyrics, reminded me of a time several weeks back where I spent an afternoon amidst rolling hills in Virginia in very amiable company, one in particular whose memory I will hold dear forever. I am saddened to say that I have only met Tito Rico Ortanez once. I met him a month ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Enderes. We were there to get to know one another, families that will be soon be united forever by the union of their loved one, coming together at last. There I met him and his beautiful wife Badette. Happiness bounced off the walls of the house as we shared stories, joined in karaoke, did a little cha-cha, and tickled the ivories of a grand instrument, the music wafting through the air like a cool, welcoming breeze on a hot, summery day. I remember asking him if he played. He remarked, ” a little”.

Despite having recorded many albums and performed all over, Tito Rico never allowed for boastfulness to seep in and taint his soul. After lingering in the background, watching my feeble attempts at the piano, he sat down and played. I had heard of his talents before I met him, but to watch him play and be in the presence of so beautiful a music, I was profoundly mesmerized and deeply touched. Emotion and passion flowed through his fingers to capture the notes of the piano and gently breathed life into them – the stories to be told by the notes are infinite. That day, Tito Rico told the story of life and its struggles and how we should try to overcome them. I wish I knew Tagalog so I can grasp a deeper understanding of his musical poetry, but the little that I know, the short moment that I shared with him, left an indelible impression of a man whose passion and love emanates not only from his masterpieces but from his being. He walked a path of togetherness, of unity.

At a time when conditions in the world strive hard to separate us, to sever any semblance of relationships we might have or can have, Tito Rico strove in the opposite direction: he strove for unity. He greeted his soon-to-be nephew-in-law, Adrian, with Bahasa Indonesia. He passionately discussed the issues of the world with his soon-to-be nephew, not for argument’s sake, but for understanding. Through his music and activism, he sought to bring together the cultures and faiths he grew to love: Filipino, American, Jewish, Christian, Islamic. A song on his new album, “In the Name of Religion”*, provokes us to question what faith really means for us and what kind of path will our faith lead us to. He was born a Catholic but moved on to the next world as a man of all faiths. He was able to find enlightenment in all of them, commonalities that should bring us together as we continue on our paths in this world.

Life is not an eternal matter, we are only here for a moment. What I have learned from Tito Rico is the importance of how we make of the moments we are so blessed to have here. When I met him, Tito Rico was already diagnosed with terminal cancer. He never let his ailment prevent him from enjoying the precious moments we all tend to take for granted and because of that, to me, he did not appear to be sickly at all. Instead, he presented an image of strength, of endurance, of vitality. He strummed the guitar like he always did. He sang his heart out during “Country Road” and “Words”.

Our paths here all intertwine, we do not journey alone, we all have stories to share that can enrich our visions and empower our dreams. If we create barriers against one another, on the basis of ethnicity, of religion, of culture: Indonesian, Muslim, Christian, Filipino, Padang, Jawa, Chinese, Jewish, American then we have severely limited our experiences, severely stinted our own growth. If God had wanted all of us to be the same, He would have done so.

Thank you, Tito Rico, for reminding all of us of the importance of unity and compassion. May you finally rest in peace.

Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilaihi Rajiun

To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.

Please accept our deepest condolences and may God give strength to his family and friends who love him so dearly.

 

To rise above…

There will always be that someone, any one, who will find a way to bring down your day – and how you feel about yourself. No matter how much you have accomplished, how hard you have worked or toiled, they will only see and comment on the little faults, the little mishaps you do. Never ready for a good comment, every prepared to dish out a bad one.

What can you do when you are faced with such a person, or as I like to call them: a negative ninny?

Are you to take the punch they have given you and fall down, never to get up again?

Are you to charge at them with the same amount of derision?

What can you do? What can we do?

I still am searching for the answer, and maybe we won’t find the “best” way to handle such a predicament with so negative a person. Or perhaps, the best, and only, way is to simply rise above.

Rise above all that negative energy and refuse to succumb to their level. Take a deep breath, brush our shoulders (or bum off, if we have fallen), and rise above.

Those negative ninnies do not hold the keys for your success, they are just a stepping stone, or a bump, we need to overcome on the road we are on. And frankly, there will always be a negative ninny in our lives  no matter where we go or what we do. They will always exist. Therefore it’s not a matter or retaliating or succumbing to the emotions we feel at their charges against us, but a matter of rising above the hurdle they have put before us and succeeding. We can succeed.

Even if they are on our paths, they are not in our way – unless we let them.

 

When did you last see your parents?

As I browsed the upcoming trailers on Yahoo Movies, I came across a trailer for the film, “When did you last see your father?” The terminal illness and imminent death of the lead character’s father forces him to look back at “everything funny, embarrassing, and upsetting about his childhood” and “come to terms with his father, and their history of conflict, and learns to accept that one’s parent are not always accountable to their children”.

The trailer, with its snippets from the movie, moves the audience to transport themselves to the past and remember it in all its glory, all tears, all embarrassment, all the conflicts we have tucked safely away into that corner of our mind where uncomfortable memories are stored, in the hopes that they will never be brought up again. As key players in our lives, our parents undoubtedly have central roles in many of these uncomfortable memories, and whose actions may have unwittingly shaped who we are today – for better or for worse. As they endeavor to execute their roles as parents who become our teachers, our punishers, and at moments, our friends all at the same time, we have come to view them as one with their roles and actions, and have weighed our judgment against them accordingly. Their concerns, their stresses, their frustrations – that may be an understandable reasoning behind their actions that we feel have maligned us – bear no significance to our judgments, for they are no more an individual with human concerns who commit human errs, they are our parents – no more, no less.

The pleadings and advises have become nags and lectures – buttressing our growing annoyance everytime our parents open their mouths.

The very parent who have unselfishly raised us, provided us with all the assistance we need to mature into a self-sufficient adult have become a burden to our schedule, a meddling force in our lives that we are so quick to get rid of, so easy to lament against, so ready to be free from. When it is their time to need our help, we brush them away.

Could they not understand that we have to go to this new restaurant? Don’t they know we have to see that new movie? Can they not see that our hair needs a haircut and our nails needs a pedicure?

Mom, stop bugging me! Dad, stop lecturing me! Stop sending me those annoying emails, I don’t read them anyway! I don’t want to talk to you right now! Go away! You are so old-fashioned! You are so annoying! Just leave me alone! You don’t understand! Just shut up, shut up okay! Enough with your nagging, your lectures, your complaints!

As the writer of this article, I will admit that the phrases above have slipped out to be used against my own parents at one point or another. And as I write this very sentence, I am sorry the phrases above even slipped through my mind.

Whatever the offense our parents have made, however much their actions have humiliated or hurt us, they do have a right to be seen, to be heard, to be understood. Without them, we wouldn’t be here, our tomorrows would never occur, and our present could not happen nor would our past exist to learn from.

We are an imagination, a hope, a longing before our parents brought us into existence. Life is before us because of them. Before their time to walk this earth shall pass, let me ask you,

“When did you last see your parents?”

 

A smidgen of strength – a lesson from the impoverished

I, like many others, have bemoaned our unfortunate circumstances and how God must be angry with us for we are plagued with problem after problem after problem. We embrace this frustration so deeply that it has become ingrained into our minds, embedded deeply into the recesses of our consciousness until we cannot separate ourselves from these feelings of distraught and thus our every movement, be it physical or spiritual, become tainted with them.

Any little thing will set us off, somehow reminding us of our woes and pathetic circumstances, enabling us to plunge further into the black-hole of despair, rendering us unable to free ourselves from the vicious cycle of self pity.

If we really have time to ponder, to reflect on our circumstances, are we able to, for a moment, release the restraints of despair and introspect on the reality of our conditions:

Are we really that bad off?
Is life really that horrible?

Many of us forget, so caught up in our woes, how fortunate we really are.

On pages 250 and 251 of my Sociology book, there is a photographic essay on the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The photographs are not depicting normal touristy attractions, but a hidden place, so far off from the tourist map and one where many would not even venture to peek into, either literally or even vicariously. It is of the village within the city dump of Phnom Penh.

Yes, there are people living in the city dump, not just adults but also children.
There are photographs depicting their normal lives that revolve around carrying bags and bags of their newfound treasures from the trash of others; of children riding around in bikes, playing ontop of the road–which consist of nothing more than leveled trash; and of them eating and bathing amidst the mounds and mounds of garbage.

Now tell me, could any one of us really live like that?

The photographs also remind me of the conditions of my fellow Indonesians who live beside the foul-smelling river in Jakarta. I remember having to walk across a plank not even 5 inches wide, to get to this part of the city. Conveniently tucked away, underneath the numerous bridges, the houses are compact and close together. You cannot reach them by car, only by foot or by motorcycle. Inside, they mainly have one room as their living space. And this is shared by 4-5 people, sometimes more.

I wonder now if they ever cringe from the smell emanating from that foul river, so heavily infested with waste and garbage and maybe a mutant animal or two, or how they could withstand being flooded every time the rain comes down.

There is also this elderly lady who would, every morning, walk around the neighborhood of comfortable houses safely behind proudly erected gates and pick away at the trash left behind in the front, by the street. She would have with her this burlap bag, filled to the max and seemingly impossible for her to burden her small, tiny frame with. Somehow, though, she manages to do it, every morning, of every day, of every week, every month, and every year.

And then there’s the ‘Children of the Street’ (Anak Jalanan). They weave in and out of traffic–stopped momentarily by the red of the stoplight–and glance inside each waiting car to catch someone’s eye, hopefully a friendly eye. The clothes on their back are crumpled, wrinkled, and smudged with debris and mud from pollution. Despite their wretched conditions, they manage a smile, a big smile at either the occupants of the car or at one another.

Their playground is the side of the busy highway, beneath the toll road up above buzzing with cars going to and from the overly populated capital. Balls are thrown in the air to gleeful faces awaiting to catch them in return; a cluster of three gather to sit on the edge of the sidewalk engrossed in a conversation probably speckled with childhood imagination and tainted with the depressed state of their own realities.

I drove past them behind the gated comforts of my conditions back home and I wonder, with sympathetic curiousity, what are their lives like, what would it be like to be in their shoes for even one day, what would make me smile in those conditions? Would I be able to remain positive?

I may not know what life for them is like, and I may not be able to properly wear their shoes, but I do know that it does take more than a smidgen of strength to endure such hardships day in and day out–especially to endure it with a smile on your face and a positive spirit that refuses to be cut down no matter the obstacle facing it.

“..many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle…Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history.

Strong rare characters are thus created; poverty nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother; distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes the spirits “– Les Miserables

- Fall 2007

 

Tis the season…

2008 is on its way to becoming the year of life-changing experiences. All around, couples are either newly engaged, married, or pregnant. I know of more than a handful of women who are now pregnant or have just become mommies, or are newly pregnant again. Weddings also abound this year as well as engagements. Though the economy is slowing, the housing market plummeting, and a recession is seemingly around the corner (hopefully not), people are continuing on with their lives – which is a very good thing. The not so good thing is the continuing of the “keeping up with the Joneses” complex that seems to plague everyone who are in the middle of this wonderful, oh so magical, life changing experience. The government encouraging (or pushing) us to spend, spend, spend! does not help the situation at all. The journey towards these blessed events are ever more burdened with the race towards maintaining a degree of comfortability that at times exceeds our capabilities.

The baby can’t have just any old stroller, s/he needs a Bugaboo, a Quinny! The crib bedding has to be Serena and Lily, Ducduc, not secondhand! Clothing has to be from Gymboree, Baby Gap, Burberry, not from Ebay or thrift stores! Her engagement ring can’t be less than half a carat or 10k in white gold, it needs to be more than one carat and platinum with flawless diamonds encircling it! Our wedding can’t be at home, it needs to be at the Grand, the OmniShoreham, the Four Seasons!

But does it really?

 

Man-Up?

I recently brought up the idea of giving our little Bubba a play kitchen, complete with refrigerator, stove, and maybe even microwave. Here he can learn the functions of said objects without actually tampering with the real-life versions and getting hurt by his experimentation (i.e the jamming of little fingers in refrigerator doors or spilling of hot oil atop a little head). He can pretend play he’s whipping a divine meal on his play stove and storing up goodies galore in his play refrigerator. The possibilities are endless!

My wonderful idea was stopped though of cries of “no, you’ll make him girly”, “no, get him a tool box and bench set instead”, and the like that bring up perceived future threats against his manhood/masculinity. Play kitchen set= girly thus little boy with play kitchen set will end up being girly, or even worse: feminine!

 

A Lesson in Persuasion

Still fighting a horribly stubborn bug, I have resigned myself downstairs, quarantined if you will, and relinquishing my mind to the excesses enrobed in flowing gowns and British accents so found within a Jane Austen movie, and any other period romance film. I shamelessly admit having a fondness for such lavish displays of dated gentility and pretentious claims of stature. The plot pitting a bookish heroine against the trivialities of her society, and her eventually dumbfounding them by winning over the heart of someone supposedly out of her league, is one many women can relate to, or want to relate to.

As the gowns get shorter and the genteel mannerisms giving way to crass, and at times harsh, interactions between the sexes, there is one constant that remains: the obsession with class, beauty, and all things superficial.