By Robert P. Bomboy
The New Yorker magazine
noted recently that the Geisinger Health System is giving free groceries to
diabetic patients across its far-flung territory.
I don't know how many readers also
subscribe to the New Yorker, but it's one of the nation's best sources
of honest reporting and news analysis, much as the Saturday Evening Post
was for our grandparents and great-grandparents from 1897 to 1963.
Geisinger has many diabetic
patients. Diabetes can be passed down through families genetically and because
mothers, fathers, and children eat too many unhealthful foods and not enough
healthful ones.
The area that Geisinger serves has
been historically prone to diabetes. Throughout the middle of Pennsylvania,
many patients live in towns and villages that don't have grocery stores or
supermarkets. Families buy the foods they eat in convenience stores or
low-price outlets, a practice that feeds unhealthful diets.
Geisinger has sought to change that
situation by giving diabetics healthful foods through a hospital pharmacy. Its
first Fresh Food Pharmacy has opened at the Geisinger Shamokin Hospital. With a
Geisinger doctor's prescription for it, patients who have diabetes or diabetic
family members can get, for free, fresh vegetables, high-protein and low-fat
meats, non-fattening flour, and other food products.
Giving patients and their families
healthful foods costs Geisinger $2,000 a year for each patient, but it says
it's saving an average of $24,000 per patient because fewer need kidney
dialysis, eye surgeries, and care for other complications that diabetes causes.
The diabetics eating better have seen their average weight and blood pressure
fall too.
The New Yorker's financial
correspondent, Adam Davidson, pointed out that - as might be expected - the
effort to repeal and replace Obamacare isn't looking at cost-saving experiments
like this at all. "The health-care bill recently passed by the House of
Representatives would transfer money to the rich (in the form of a tax cut) and
slash Medicaid," Davidson says accurately.
The House bill will strip millions of us of our health
insurance coverage, destroy protections for mothers, fathers, and children with
pre-existing conditions, and cut billions of dollars from Medicaid, which is
providing the wherewithal to treat and protect 63,000 Pennsylvanians against
death from drug overdoses.
Drug addiction is epidemic in
Pennsylvania; of the 50 states, we are the sixth highest state for drug
overdoses, higher than New York and New Jersey. A huge part of Obamacare
expanded Medicaid, providing money to prevent overdose deaths here. As Governor
Tom Wolfe has said: "Access to treatment through Medicaid is keeping
Pennsylvanians alive who might otherwise face overdoses or worse.”
The House bill snatched that
life raft away. I expect the same to be true of the Senate bill. No one knows,
because the millionaires there - including our Republican Senator Pat Toomey -
have kept their proposed repeal of Obamacare completely hidden from us, the
American people.
As I wrote in a previous
column, Toomey and his millionaire buddies haven't listened to anyone who might
want to protest what they're doing - not a single hearing, not a single person
or expert. Even the Republicans in Congress didn't know what was in the Senate
bill until Thursday when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, showed a
rough draft to his Republican colleagues, but not to the Democrats. He wants a
vote on his Frankenstein next week.
Millions of people are outraged
at what the Senate is doing.
I'm protesting and I hope you
will too.
Call, write, or email Senator
Toomey. His Twitter handle is: @SenToomey. Tell him you're not rich and you won't stand for this anymore.
If only three Republicans
will vote against this blindfold Senate bill, it won't pass. It's possible that
there are three real heroes among these six I've identified. Please find
their emails or Twitter handles and reach out to them: Sens. Lamar Alexander,
Shelley Moore Capito, Dr. Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Dean Heller, and Lisa
Murkowski.
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