It's pretty cozy if you're a senator or representative serving in Washington, D.C.
The generous taxpayers of America and their employers long ago agreed to provide elected officials with good health insurance to keep officials focused on work instead of worries about averting personal financial destruction as a result of catastrophic illness.
Idaho's senators and congressmen work in taxpayer-funded offices that have both heat and light—comfortable places where study, discussions and an occasional nap can occur.
From their offices, it must be hard for Idaho's senators and representatives—all of whom have gone on record opposing the major health care reforms before Congress—to understand the risks, tradeoffs, insecurities and fears that are the result of today's health insurance options.
Idaho's senators and representatives need to get out of their cozy offices, away from their political handlers, out of their comfort zones and hit the streets.
They need to talk to small-business owners, bruised by insurance costs, who have no way to get a good deal for employees. They need to hear from companies that must weigh the drain of high health-care costs on development and expansion against leaving employees and families without health insurance.
They need to talk to uninsured working parents about their fears for their children and themselves should illness strike.
They need to talk to working parents who have lost health insurance because they were laid off. They need to meet people who are dying because they are uninsured or underinsured and can't get necessary treatments.
They need to talk to middle-class families driven to bankruptcy and homelessness by catastrophic illness.
They need to talk to hospitals about the increasing numbers of uninsured people who finally come to expensive emergency rooms for treatment of illnesses that basic care could have prevented.
They need to talk to hospitals about how they have no choice but to pass along the exorbitant costs of treating poor people in emergency rooms to people who pay.
They need to hang out with the growing numbers of homeless people in Idaho, spend a day on the street and a night trying to find a place to sleep in one of Boise's overcrowded homeless shelters.
They need to sit with county commissioners and listen as desperate, indigent people are forced to set aside their dignity to beg for public help to reduce the effects of their illnesses.
If members of Idaho's delegation really understood that reform is about the real fear and pain of real people, could they continue to be satisfied using Band-Aids on a system that clearly needs an overhaul?
