Do The Math

Positively Liberal

The Martian

I ate pizza last night. I'm not supposed to. Spring Break is coming up and I'm still trying to lose my Obama weight. Plus every time I hit a new low weight goal, a member of the Trump administration resigns... So there's that pressure.

I didn't have a choice. I was at a charity event for the Cancer Moonshot. All they were serving was pizza and beer. I skipped the beer but ate the pizza. I had to eat something other than peanuts.

Don't get me wrong, it was great pizza and looked like good beer. But obviously a low budget event. They are trying to raise money and support patients and families stricken with blood borne cancers. Top shelf food would give the wrong impression and would be a serious misallocation of resources.

There were two speakers. One, a seasoned surgical oncologist, the other an adult patient who had been diagnosed with progressively more serious forms of leukemia over the last 10 years. I think it was four times. I lost count. Yes, her story was that bad. She had been diagnosed with cancer so many times, I lost count.

The doctor gave a fairly standard talk about the advances in research and treatment. She talked about how important the millions raised by charities helped the effort and how on any given day there were between 600-650 new treatments being researched, depending on what grants were awarded.

She talked about the incredible cost of treatment. She talked about how financially crippling it was and how even someone with good insurance could be bankrupt by medication cost alone. $5,000 to $7,000 per week for medication is not unusual. $5000 per week!

And people are foregoing treatment because they cannot afford it.

Almost no one can afford the cost of care on their own. And certainly no one would be able to pay for the cost of funding their own research and finding their own cures. It requires collective effort. You simply cannot do it alone.

One thing she said stuck out. She said "Everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, deserves first class medical treatment. Everyone." No one should be left on their own.

Let that sink in a minute... No one should be left on their own.

I know the arguments. I know the costs. But let me paraphrase Matthew McConaughey's closing argument from "A Time To Kill."

Picture that poor African American or Hispanic, or Asian or, God forbid, Syrian refugee child lying in the hospital bed, bald, tired, eyes sunken in, lesions on their throat from chemotherapy and unable to pay for any more cancer treatments. Their family is bankrupt from medical costs they will never be able to pay. Close your eyes and picture that child...

Now... put your child in that bed.

I don't have to close my eyes. My child was in that bed. I was ready to spend every dime I had and more to save his life. I would have given anything... everything to make him better. There was no other option.

Shouldn't every patient be that important?

It's not that we don't have the money, we do. It's not that we don't have the skills, or the technology, or the science, we do. It's that we don't care.

Or we don't care enough. Or we don't care about the right things. If we did, if this were a high enough priority, we would do more about it than eat pizza in the upstairs meeting room of a midwestern microbrewery and talk about fundraising for research.

If it was truly a priority there would be no need for the fundraisers.

We don't care enough about the right things and we care too much about the wrong things. We spend our days quibbling about who talked to whom and what they said. We spend too much time being afraid of people who look different or act different or talk different than we do.

There is no talk of a fundraiser to build a wall.

We spent time, energy and resources building walls to keep "those people" out, or feathering our own nests. I'm guilty of it too.

I can't wait to see the new iPhone. And yes, even though it is a waste of resources, I'll buy it.

Why? Because my priorities are out of whack. Just like yours.

I'm an estate planner. I talk to people every day about making decisions for their families' futures. I help them set priorities and then build a plan around those priorities.

It's simply a matter of deciding what is most important and meeting that goal first. It's about putting needs before wants. It's not that hard. But you have to think and plan ahead. You can’t be afraid of the future. You can't just react.

We are a wealthy nation in many ways. You personally, might not feel wealthy. You just looked at your checking account balance. It's probably smaller than you'd like. But you are wealthy. We are wealthy. We have wealth that goes beyond today's checkbook balance.

And we need to decide our real priorities. Who are we? What is most important? What are our needs and our wants?

What can we do on our own and what are the things that require our pooled resources?

Within the span of one day our leaders in Washington released an Executive Order banning "the other," and a draft of a nationwide healthcare plan. To be honest, I haven't read either. I'm at the gym, working off last night's pizza.

I don't have to read them. I already know that there is going to be more focus on building walls than healing the sick. There is going to be more focus on saving money than loving our neighbor. More focus on what's in it for me over what is best for us.

There is going to be more emphasis on using our pooled resources to allay our fears than to strengthen our people. Why aren't we focused on using our pooled resources for us?

Remember, the "us," that liberal, progressive, socialist "us" the poor, dark-skinned child in a hospital bed and now you have to pay for it "us;" the why don't they just go back where they came from, trying to do us harm, lazy, whiner, hippie, millennial "us" includes you too. And it includes your beautiful child or grandchild or next door neighbor.

What are your priorities for your family? What does your child deserve? What is your child worth?

Is any other child worth... less?

But we can't afford it. No you can't. You can't afford it alone. But, yes. Yes we can afford it. We just choose not to. It's not that we there isn't enough money. We have decided it's not a priority. We would rather build walls, because we are afraid.

The second speaker last night, the one with more cancer diagnoses than I could count, quoted another movie, "The Martian." At the end, the once stranded astronaut, Mark Whatney, now home, says to a group of prospective astronauts:

At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

I refuse to accept defeat. I refuse to believe this is the best we can do. I refuse to accept the premise that the only way to stay safe is to build walls. I refuse to accept that we cannot afford to keep all of us healthy. We are better than that.

We have to begin. We have stop squabbling and to get to work. We have to do the math. And solve one problem and then the next and the next.

But before we can do any of that, we have to set our priorities. We have to decide that we can do it all. Not just that we want to do it all, but that we need to do it all. We can be safe AND healthy. We can provide for our own families AND our fellow man.

Once we realize that, once we accept that, all we have to do is the math.