Today’s Agenda

Fixing health care has shot to near the top of the American agenda, pushed there by the horrible statistics. Forty million Americans uninsured, more than 6 million of them in California. Millions more under-insured. Shockingly high fees charged to insured patients by doctors and hospitals scrambling to make up the cost of patients who can’t pay. People living in poverty but still too “rich” to qualify for Medi-Cal. Spiraling health costs driving up the national debt. But each of those millions is a person, seeking a way to cope.

In Platform, we hear from people who are close to the edge--or over the edge--of the medical insurance abyss. A woman with multiple sclerosis, a few months away from losing her coverage, predicts she won’t be able to work without the treatment that keeps her going and could end up on Medi-Cal unless she can get into the state’s high-risk insurance pool. A widow who has coverage for herself sees friends who lose insurance when their husbands die.

There are a few bright spots in this dilemma. One is a group of programs known as OB Access, which has greatly increased the availability of prenatal care for poor mothers. Making a Difference profiles this private/public partnership between L.A. County and a group of physicians and hospitals, developed in response to alarming shortages in the late 1980s. Infant mortality rates have fallen as the program was implemented, and it’s tempting to give OB Access a lot of the credit.

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When Mom is European-American and Dad is African-American, or vice versa, kids know with their own eyes that they’re a blend, a mixture. But society, starting with the Census Bureau, forces them to choose. In Testimony, Nancy Brown, who is half of a mixed couple and runs a group providing support for similar families, talks about this tension and the damage it can do, especially when added to racism. But if children are raised to appreciate all of their heritage, they do just fine, she says.

And in Community Essay, a mother of three in Los Angeles illuminates a decision that Bill and Hillary Clinton recently had to make. Victoria Thompson’s two youngest are in public schools, and she’s a strong believer in the system. But the older girl is in a private middle school. Perhaps like the Clintons, who are sending their daughter to a private school in Washington, Thompson felt she couldn’t risk the problems of Los Angeles’ middle and high schools. But she understands what her defection means to those who don’t have the luxury of such choices. It’s a debate that isn’t going to go away--in Washington, Los Angeles, anywhere.

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I n the Gripe column, Mich elle Mooney tells us that too often we don’t value what is easily come by, which is why stray cats are everywhere. License cats, she says, make them cost something.

And finally, there’s a message in the advertising slogan, “Don’t leave home without it,” says the Rev. Calvin H. Bowers in Sermon. He doesn’t mean a credit card, he says, but a strong set of goals and values for young people, plus a sense of self-worth.