Trump’s Advance Team prepared the way, 4 years ago for his return to power as a Convicted Felon.
On January 6, 2021, violent supporters of Donald Trump broke into and vandalized the U.S. Capitol Building. They smashed windows to take over the Capitol Rotunda, where they proceeded to defecate and urinate throughout the national historic site.
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump will be sworn into the the office of President on the very same site where his supporters defecated and urinated 4 years earlier, preparing the way for Trump’s return to power, as convicted Felon.
Here’ s a complete video of the January 6, 2021, violent takeover of the Capitol Rotunda:
Sometimes, there’s a much deeper, hidden explanation for how people behave.
(“Hedwig & the Angry Inch” was the brilliant stage musical of 1998—turned into a film three years later—written by the talented actor John Cameron Mitchell, with music and lyrics written by Stephen Trask. It’s the story of a Queer performer whose life took a different cut then they expected. The unique musical and film were the inspirations for this poem).
Zuckwig and his Insecure Inch,
Ungrateful for his billions, like a Grinch.
Nevermind he bought half of Kauai for swimmin,’
He measures his worth by how he trashes women.
A college flunky who couldn’t ask for dates,
Zuckwig is consumed with piles of vile self-hate;
Makes an App to anonymously give girls a rating,
Saving him from their sneers and nerd/weakling hating.
“I’ll show them” says Zuckwig,
“I’ll become very rich.”
“I’ll make them like me,
Not give me the ditch.”
So, he sprinkles some Winklevoss dust on their photos,
And vows not to look like some creepy Quasimoto.
Training his voice to sound like Theranos’ Lizzy Holmes,
Zuckwig vows to stop being a gnarly little gnome.
He takes martial arts, testosterone too,
Wears $900,000 watches, such a masculine brew.
He feels Joe Rogan’s biceps, hardens his rump,
Then schleps his little ass, to bow before Trump.
In with “Masculine Energy,”
Out with “Toxic Masculinity,”
Shouts the Artificial Hunk,
Who only ‘virtually’ lost his virginity.
Zuckwig declares war on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,
And considers “All-Gender” banos to be too much of an intrusion.
His Tiny Little Inch, feeling suddenly insecure—
Suppose a Trans Man came in, with something not so demure?
On the National Day of Mourning for President Jimmy Carter, a reminder that humanitarian work, to repair the world, is needed now, more than ever.
(President Jimmy Carter convenes the opening meeting of the first Presidential Commission on Hunger in 1978. Harry Chapin, who persuaded Carter to create the first—and only—Hunger Commission of it’s kind in US History, is the bushy haired guy pictured in the top right of the photo. Bess Myerson, former NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, is seated in the white jacket, in the center of the photo.)
Tomorrow is the National Day of Mourning for President Jimmy Carter who died just before 2025 began, at 100 years old.
Over the past several years, as he endured brain cancer, the death of Rosalyn, his wife of 77-years, and long-term hospice care, Carter has quietly, often silently, been teaching all of us a daily lesson on the dignity of dying after living a deeply purposeful and humanitarian life.
The National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, will be attended by world leaders and ordinary citizens who had great admiration for his life of self-less service, and it comes in one of history’s most jarring juxtapositions, on the day before President-elect Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions will be affirmed by a Court, making him the first Felon ever elected to the Presidency, and the most self-serving individual to ever occupy the Presidency.
The contrast between moral good and evil—fundamental values in which Carter, a devout Christian, believed deeply—could not be more clear. Even many of the white, fundamentalist Christians who supported both Carter and Trump will have to sit up and take notice.
While we all love the later years of Jimmy Carter, I was never a big fan of his as either a candidate for President, or as President.
With the exception of his commitment to renewable energy, and his brokering of the Camp David Peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1977, Carter was too politically conservative for me; too much of an incrementalist; not the kind of tough, crusading advocate for justice, human rights and the Rule of Law that many of us craved, following the corrupt times of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Watergate.
Post-presidency, Carter would grow into a towering international human rights leader, and as a Jew uncomfortable with Israel’s lurch into right-wing fundamentalism, I applauded his early and courageous conclusion that the Israeli government’s deprivation of equal rights for Arab-born Israelis and Palestinians, amounted to Apartheid. Other Jews condemned Carter for his candor.
Years later, he would rail against the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, as heralding the establishment of the United States as an oligarchy, for sale to the highest bidder. Trump’s 2024 election, with a quarter-of-a billion dollar campaign contribution from the world’s richest man who does billions of dollars of business with the federal government, only proved Carter to be prophetic once again.
But, back in 1974, Democrats, across the country swept into near veto-proof power in Congress in the mid-term elections, adding 49 new seats in the House, giving them a commanding 291-seat majority; in the Senate, Democrats picked up 4 seats, producing a filibuster-proof majority of 61.
With the rise of progressivism in Congress few Democratic activists wanted a milquetoast candidate for President in 1976, even if the candidate was a Washington outsider with a winning smile who promised he’d never lie to us.
Many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted a tough, populist champion like Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, or Rep. Mo Udall from Arizona to lead the Democratic National ticket in 1976. To many, Jimmy Carter was just far too cautious.
Even singer/songwriter Harry Chapin, who would later persuade Jimmy Carter to create the nation’s first and only Hunger Commission, and himself served on that unique Commission from 1978-1980, had his doubts.
Chapin was a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention for the fiery liberal and environmental advocate Rep. Mo Udall, who advocated breaking up Big Oil and enacting National Health Insurance. Udall finished second to Jimmy Carter in six presidential primaries.
A few years back I interviewed social activist Bill Ayers, a former Catholic priest in the great social justice tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigans.
Ayers, a NYC-area radio DJ and an authentic “radical priest”, co-founded World Hunger Year (WHY) with Harry Chapin in 1975. It was the team of Bill Ayres, Harry and Sandy Chapin and former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, which brought the idea of creating the very first US Hunger Commission to the newly-elected President Carter.
Harry Chapin’s family—with ancestors like his grandfather Kenneth Burke, the literary giant and semanticist, and his great-aunt Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Workers movement, was far more radical on social issues than many fans of Harry’s music were, and much more of an ardent advocate for change than Jimmy Carter, who, oddly, liked the lyrics of many of Bob Dylan songs for social change.
Chapin was determined to “do something” with his life—in addition to his music—and was eager to use his celebrity to alleviate hunger and suffering.
In my 2018, interview with Bill Ayres, Harry’s hunger-fighting partner, Ayres told me that:
“ What Harry didn’t like about Carter for one thing, was that he stacked the Pres. Hunger Commission with a whole bunch of people who were not the people who were going to solve hunger. But, the people that were on from the Congress were people we knew—Leahy, being the primary one, Rick Nolan (from Minnesota), the other Dem; Ben Gilman, the Republican, and Bob Dole. Dole grew up in Kansas during the Great Depression, when farmers were losing their farms. We (WHY Hunger) honored him and Senator George McGovern one night. Dole told me that “my Republican friends have never forgiven me for allowing food stamps to be free.”
Among the Commission members for whom Chapin had little patience was it’s Chair, former Xerox Corporation Chairman Sol Linowitz who, Harry believed, was watering down this historic Hunger Commission’s final report and only paying “lip service” to the underlying causes of hunger. Chapin and two other progressive members of the Commission—Senator Leahy and Rep. Nolan—were frequent dissenters on key sections of the Presidential Hunger Commission Report.
In one notable dissent of the report, published 45 years ago, Harry and his two colleagues protested:
“The most glaring issue not addressed is the most important—the interrelationships between our economic and governmental policies and hunger…
Only through expeditious action emanating from the highest levels of policymaking can we hope to map out an integrated program identifying the near-term, intermediate and long-range components of a comprehensive strategy to alleviate hunger…Poverty, not hunger, constitutes the central strand in the web of underdevelopment.”
Many of the Commission’s corporate members were not willing to push the envelope that far, nor did they share Harry’s single-mindedness of purpose for immediate action.
Bill Ayres described it this way:
“Harry never missed a meeting. (Despite a crushing performance schedule).I wentto some of meetings with him. I listened. A whole bunch of people that Carter had chosen. Some good, some not so good. Bess Myerson never came.”
By the summer of 1980, after the final Hunger Commission report was published and put on a shelf, and Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran failed, Chapin began to get disillusioned. He saw Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President, as an uncaring & opportunistic charlatan, and Carter as a decent and well-meaning human being, but an ineffective public official.
Harry was passionate about federal action on poverty as essential to tackling world hunger, and became frustrated by the lack of urgency coming from others.
Bill Ayres summed it up well:
“Yes. And part of that was– let’s go to Washington and shake the tree! So the presidential hunger commission was a real breakthrough. Nobody had done that before. Again, that was Sandy’s idea. And it was a Presidential Commission on WORLD Hunger, so it was not Domestic Hunger so much. The Commission’s work went from1978-1980, when they finished their work and put out a document. The document didn’t go anyplace because Reagan got elected.”
“ Harry and I watched the 1980 election results together and we cried, and I said, “Shit. 3 years down the drain.” But he didn’t see it that way. He said, “Nope. We got to get back again and fight the bastards some more!” He wasn’t giving up.”
Harry Chapin never did give up; nor did Bill Ayres, the Chapin family, WHY Hunger, or any of the Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country…nor did Jimmy Carter. Some 45 years after the creation of the only Presidential Hunger Commission in US history, and five decades after the creation of WHY Hunger, the work of fighting hunger, poverty and powerlessness envisioned by Harry and Sandy Chapin and Bill Ayres continues, assisting thousands of families struggling to survive, and increasing food security for millions more.
Carter and Chapin came from dramatically different families, cultures and backgrounds, with sharply different personalities and approaches to social and political change. Yet, their lives’ work and legacies intertwined during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, and beyond.
The year after Carter lost the Presidency, Harry Chapin lost his life in a tragic car crash at the age of 39. But Chapins’ work of reducing food insecurity and empowering the hungry lives on, as does Jimmy Carter’s extraordinary international efforts in advancing public health, ensuring democratic elections abroad, and his undaunted domestic work through “Habitat for Humanity,” still providing housing security for many of this country’s most vulnerable families—many of the same families who have come to rely upon the Harry Chapin Food Banks for their next meals.
Harry Chapin and Jimmy Carter were an unlikely, but powerful, ticket for long-term, structural change, and their lives, and legacies, are instructions for all the good that decent human beings can bring into this world, despite enormous challenges.
The first women elected Lt. Governor of NYS was one of my earliest mentors and inspirations to answer the call to public service. She died this week at 92, but her legacy lives on.
One of my early mentors and inspirations in government and politics, Mary Anne Krupsak, has died at the age of 92. Her death, coming just a few days after Jimmy Carter’s at age 100, underscores my belief that all the wrong people are dying.
Sam Roberts of The New York Times has written an elegant tribute to her, which took me back some 54 years when I first met Mary Anne as she campaigned for State Assembly in upstate New York, and I was a college Junior at the University at Albany, SUNY. My college friend Tim Palmer who worked for Mary Anne and was devoted to her, invited me to campaign with them, and we hammered up posters and handed out flyers across the Assembly District. Mary Anne, an original progressive populist, won in a landslide, despite opposition from Democratic Party bosses locally, and across the State..
Two year later, in 1972, Mary Anne also bucked party leaders (including Albany’s Mayor Erastus Corning, and NYS Dem Party Chairman Joe Crangle) when she backed my insurgent primary campaign for State Assembly in Albany County. Her endorsement called me “an articulate, effective fighter for reform of the Legislature, who will continue the momentum we’ve begun to open up our institutions of government…”
Tim Palmer chaired my campaign, and Carol Villano (then Carol Jacobson), was the largest contributor to my insurgent candidacy with a $75 donation. I had to deny that I was marrying her for her money, which I did on the steps of Albany City Hall.
We were all full of ourselves in those days, following our involvement in the anti-war movement, and the women’s rights movement in NYS, and Mary Anne Krupsak’s encouragement to run was the final push I needed. After all, she had introduced me to the legendary Allard Lowenstein–the man who led the ‘Dump Johnson’ movement– at a political event, so anything seemed possible.
“We need good people in government,” she said to me. And that, to the fearless Mary Anne Krupsak, was all that mattered, party bosses be damned. Even her mother Mamie, a life- force in her own right, gave me a $25 contribution and penned a handwritten letter saying that ” I hope you make it, since we need people like you in the Assembly.” Just in case I didn’t know who she was, Mamie followed her name with a parenthesis (“Mary Anne’s Mother.”)
I was 23-years old at the time, and the Chair of the Albany County, NY, New Democratic Coalition, a “reform” group of Kennedy/McCarthy Democrats from the 1968 Presidential campaigns which pushed President Lyndon Johnson out of the race over the War in Vietnam. We were a rag-tag bunch of feisty progressives, outnumbered Dems, those of us in the Albany County NDC, including Cindy Urbach, Reszin Adams, James Gallagher, Leon Cohen, Muriel Morgenstern, and a few other fellow political troublemakers.
Despite the fact that my opponent in the Democratic Primary was a conservative woman, who was a local Democratic Assistant DA, all of the State’s Women’s political groups–Women’s Political Caucus, Coalition for a Free Choice–endorsed me, since I was the only pro-choice candidate on the ballot. Having Mary Anne Krupsak, and the remarkable Sarah Kovner, in my corner helped a bit, as well. It was also the year before Roe v. Wade was decided by the US Supreme Court.
It was a fun adventure campaigning in the Republican towns of Colonie and Guilderland, and the heavily Old Democratic small cities of Cohoes and Watervliet, that hugged the Mohawk River. I loved going door to door in the ethnic neighborhoods of Cohoes, with plumbers piping serving as handrails for each working class, mill town home.
On one memorable afternoon, I met a family of registered voters who only spoke Italian. They saw my last name and welcomed me into their house, pumping me full of homemade wine, while Carol Villano and Tim Palmer were looking for me up and down the blocks outside. When I finally emerged from the old rowhouse, I could barely walk straight. Carol and Tim escorted me back to our car, and helped me home to sleep off a busy day of grassroots–or winegrape–campaigning.
I lost, of course, to the well established, well-funded, well-oiled Albany Political machine by a 2-1 margin, in the same June 20, 1972, Democratic primary where George McGovern ran against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Corning and the Albany Democratic Machine backed HHH, making Albany County the ONLY county in New York State that McGovern didn’t carry. It was my one and only run for public office.
Two years later, in 1974, at the Statewide New Democratic Coalition convention (nicknamed “November Don’t Count,” by Mario Cuomo) I was a 25-year old “Youth” Vice-President, and supported Mary Anne for Lt. Governor against Manhattan City Councilmember Antonio Olivieri and some little-known lawyer from Queens named Mario Cuomo.
Cuomo gave a boring, plodding speech at the NDC nominating convention and came in a distant 3rd. Mary Anne went on to win the Democratic Primary and the election as the State’s first female Lt. Governor in NYS history.
Years later, when I worked with Mario Cuomo from 1985-1993, I would tease him about how ineffective he was at the NDC, and that if it wasn’t for Mary Anne Krupsak challenging Hugh Carey in 1978–and for Assemblywoman Jean Amatucci refusing Carey’s offer to her to replace Mary Anne on the ticket in 1974 (another upstate Democratic woman)– he’d never have been Governor. Cuomo’s rejoinder was always: “NDC: November Don’t Count.”
Politics was fun then, and human, without incessant polling or political consultants, or unrelenting social media, and you could stop and enjoy a glass of wine or two, when you campaigned door-to-door.
The emphasis then, as opposed to now, was making human connection, being as positive, people friendly and problem-solving as you could be, and for earning free media coverage for the good ideas you represented, not the number of terrible lies you could spread.
Mary Anne Krupsak, and later Mario Cuomo, were big parts of that, and of my life, and of the proud, honorable work of serving others, instead of just yourself.
On the 10th Anniversary of Mario Cuomo’s death, thoughts of what might have been.
Mario Cuomo died 10 years ago this week, on January 1, 2015, and for one, brief, shining moment, Andrew Cuomo was re-born.
Andrew Cuomo’s simple and eloquent eulogy to his father on January 6, 2015, was a bold and loving seizing of the torch of humanist leadership his father ignited 43 years ago. It was a remarkable love song to Mario Cuomo, and if Andrew could find that voice again, he could rebuild his public service career, the way his father rebuilt New York.
That chiseled, stately, large and determined face was the same look I witnessed up close on Mario Cuomo, many, many times. Snow falling on Andrew’s dark hair, and dark suit, dramatized the somber yet historic nature of what was about to happen—it was the eulogy of his father, the forging of a force for good, that Andrew Cuomo, with his unlimited political potential was always destined to give.
I witnessed Mario Cuomo prepare for, and deliver, hundreds of speeches during the eight years I worked with him, when he was Governor or New York. I studied each line in Mario Cuomo’s face as he spoke the eloquent lines of his speeches, and black-lined out others, which did not meet his high standards. Getting what he “needed to say” just right was of great importance to him.
Up until the week his father died 10 years ago, few of Andrew Cuomo’s speeches were memorable. Actions counted more to Andrew than words. Speech-making was often just another tool in the second Governor Cuomo’s operational repair kit for government. All that changed, ever so briefly, with Andrew’s eulogy for his father.
For once, Andrew Cuomo’s words and emotions moved us, and, more importantly, they may have moved him toward his father’s progressive, other-centered, enlightened form of leadership. Andrew’s words, personal and powerful, were a radical departure from his pedestrian, overly-practical prose of the past. His words about his father were transcribed from his heart to the page from which he was reading, just as his father had done hundreds of times, by example.
“Mario Cuomo was at peace with who he was and how he saw the world. This gave him great strength, and made him anything but a typical politician,” Andrew Cuomo said, after recounting his father’s advice about speechmaking to him. “Who cares about what the audience wants to hear; it’s not about what they want to hear–it’s about what you want to say.”
“And that, my friends,” Andrew Cuomo said to a church-full of mourners, including Bill & Hillary Clinton, “was the essence of Mario Cuomo. He was not interested in pleasing the audience: not in a speech, not in life. He believed what he believed and the reaction of the audience or the powers that be, or the popularity of his belief was irrelevant to him.”
Andrew elaborated: “He wasn’t really a politician at all. Mario Cuomo’s politics were more a personal belief system then a traditional theory. It was who he was. Not what he did. My father was a humanist. He had strong feelings of right and wrong based on his religion, philosophy and life experiences. He was very concerned with how people were treated and that was the arena that drew him in….”
Then, Andrew Cuomo shared the essence of Mario Cuomo: “At his core he was a philosopher and he was a poet, an advocate and he was a crusader. Mario Cuomo was the keynote speaker for our better angels. He was there to make the case, to argue and convince, and ,in that purist he could be a ferocious opponent and powerful ally. And, he was beautiful. He believed Jesus’ teachings could be reduced to one word, and the word was love. And love means acceptance, compassion and support to help people.”
Then, Andrew Cuomo gave everyone insight into his relationship with his father: “It is this simple. I was devoted to my father, from the time I was 15 joining him in every crusade. My dad was my hero, my best friend, my confidante, my mentor. We spoke almost every day and his wisdom grew as I grew older. But we carried the same banner. I helped him become a success and he helped me become a success and we enjoyed deeply each other’s victories and we suffered the pain of each other’s losses. My only regret is that I didn’t return from Washington to help in his 1994 race. Whether or not I could have helped, I should have been there. It was the right thing to do and I didn’t do it.”
The words were powerful, and deeply personal, and unlike anything Andrew Cuomo has said before, or since.
“Why didn’t he run for President, people asked? Because he didn’t want to,” Andrew Cuomo said about his father. “He was where he thought God wanted him to be. For Mario Cuomo, the purpose of life was clear — to help those in need and leave the world a better place.”
“I believe my father’s spirit lives,” the son said, citing family and community examples. “I will listen for your voice. You taught us well, you inspired us, we know what we have to do and we will do it. On that, you have my word, as your son. I love you pop, and always will.”
More than 30 years ago, my own father was a victim of profit-centered health care, when a doctor told us “the corporation didn’t intend for this equipment to be used this way.” To keep him alive.
(Our last Christmas with my father, lower right, 1992. He died 5 months later, when his HMO repeatedly mismanaged his healthcare.)
The tragic killing of the CEO of United Health Care earlier this month ripped apart a health care corporation—and a broader, private health care system—that, for more than three decades, has put profits ahead of patient-centered care.
The cold-blooded, intentional murder of anyone—corporate executive or Palestine child— is a terrible, violent act, far outside any moral universe which rightfully condemns the denial of life, or life-saving healthcare, to any human being.
My father, a 78 years old, World War II Veteran, was a member of an HMO, once among the largest in Southern California. He has been dead for 31 years, and that specific company has been been out of business for decades, but its’ practices of prioritizing profits over patients, are more pernicious than ever before in the private healthcare industry.
My father’s case is illustrative of many others like it, with which families without wealth or influence can identify. It should be taught as a case study to healthcare executives, and medical school students, as a glaring example of the worst medical & business practices to avoid at all costs. It should serve as a guide to understanding why so many Americans are incensed at the spreadsheet-driven, corporatization of care for those we love. As the late US Senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote, “healthcare should not be a commodity.”
In the late winter, 1993, my father was experiencing difficulty urinating and began complaining of a pain in the middle of his back. A gruff, overweight Italian man, my father rarely went to “the doctor” or complained about his health. One of the rotating crop of HMO physicians who finally agreed to see him in person, said that at his age, “it wasn’t unusual to experience difficulty urinating, and that the back pain was probably the result of a draft you caught.”
He had been given the brush off by the HMO’s “gatekeeper”—a title designed to communicate the message that only certain patients made it past the gates of admission to the healthcare system. My father accepted the physician’s cursory diagnosis. After all, he was a “doctor,” my father said.
As the weeks went on, his urinary problems and back pain worsened. He began to wet himself during the night, and the pain in his back was making it difficult for him to rise up out of his reclining chair during the day. After much coaxing, we persuaded my father to see a urologist. Our family became insistent for the HMO to schedule an appointment with an urologist, and the corporation finally relented.
The HMO-assigned urologist diagnosed my father as having a bladder infection and recommended that he drink lots of cranberry juice to “clear it out of his system.” He was also prescribed an antibiotic and the pain in his back was again dismissed as nothing serious.
I described my father’s symptoms to an Oncologist friend of mine in New York who urged that we immediately get my father tested for Prostate cancer. We insisted that the HMO’s urologist see my father again, administer a PSA blood test, and do a DRE (digital rectal exam)—two simple and standard tests which, considering my father’s age and his symptoms, should have been done routinely during his first visit.
The results of the PSA test confirmed our fears: my father had an aggressive tumor that had already advanced beyond his prostate. The HMO’s urologist informed me by phone—some 2700 miles away—that my father’s cancer had not yet advanced into my father’s bones.
“What about the persistent pain in his back?” I asked.
The urologist continued to cling to his theory that my father may have caught a draft in his back.
Within one week’s time, the HMO’s urologist—who had spent a total of 30 minutes with my father during two office visits—told him that he had prostate cancer, and recommended surgical removal of my father’s prostate and testicles. For a street tough guy from Brooklyn, this was a lot to process.
I pointed out to the HMO’s urologist that my father had a low Gleason Count, and a high PSA—usually red flags for prostate cancer. I asked if he had an abnormal bone scan. The Urologist informed me he had not.
Increasingly, the evidence was building that my father’s healthcare was not being properly managed by his, so-called, “managed care” provider.
“Couldn’t hormone therapy be sued to decrease my father’s testosterone level, as long as his bone scan was not abnormal?’ I asked.
Yes, it could, the HMO’s urologist told me.
“Was it too much trouble to have explored such a possibility in the first place, “ I asked, “before immediately jumping to the conclusion that surgery was necessary? What about radiation therapy?”
The HMO’s urologist informed me that my father could be given a combination of injections, pill, and alpha blockers—which would have the side effect of lowering my father’s blood pressure.
I asked the HMO’s urologist if he was aware that my father was already taking medication to lower his blood pressure. The urologist told me he wasn’t aware of that.
“I have not seen your father’s record from the other physician, “the HMO’s urologist told me.
When my father did not respond to the hormonal therapy, and the pain in his spine became more intense, I insisted that he be given a new CAT Scan. The new CAT scan—which the HMO balked about doing—discovered a spot on his spine; in the exact location where my father was complaining about pain; the exact same spot where the HMO’s initial physician “gatekeeper”—who managed my father out of immediate care— told him he had “probably caught a draft.”
One week later, unable to breathe fully to clear his lungs because the pain in his back was now unbearable, my father was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia and placed in the ICU on a respirator.
During the first week of my father’s hospitalization, the cancer spread so rapidly into his spine he became paralyzed from the middle of his back down. The rapidly deteriorating condition of his lungs made a milogram and radiation therapy impossible—procedures which could have reduced the size of his spinal tumor had it been detected earlier. The HMO “gatekeeper’s” mismanagement of my father’s early care, coupled with a misdiagnosis by the HMO’s urologist, who initially wasn’t aware of my father’s patient record, his blood pressure levels, nor his PSA score, limited my father’s options for prolonging his life.
Four days before my father’s death, the attending physician at the HMO-owned hospital informed me that my father—whose mind and eyes were alert as he battled for each breath—was “terminal” and would not live out the week.
“You ought to give thought to taking your father off the respirator,” the HMO attending-physician told me, out of earshot from my father. “The corporation never intended for this equipment to be used this way.”
I stared at the man in the white coat, a garment considered almost sacred by my father.
“Doctor,” I said, staring directly at him, and speaking clearly and deliberately. “ I don’t care what the corporation intended. In my family, we consider life to be sacred, and we’ll do everything we can to preserve it.”
My father’s condition quickly worsened. He began to bleed internally, receiving 11 pints of blood over two days; his eyes turned from alert, to angry.
Unable to speak because of the tubes down his throat, my father signaled to me that he wanted to end his life. I tried to ignore what he was struggling to say. He pointed at the clock on the wall opposite his bed, and mouthed the words, “time to go,” I told him he was too ill to go home, and he shook his head in disgust. He pointed at all of the high-tech machines keeping him alive and turned his palms up as if to say, “what’s the use.”
I walked out of my father’s hospital room, found the HMO’s attending physician and asked him what death would be like for my father if we unplugged the respirator. His answer was flippant.
“I don’t know,” he snapped. “I’ve never experienced it.”
My questions, like my father, had become a burden for the corporation, which had mismanaged his care.
My father died the following day, refusing to breath into the respirator when the respirator technician instructed him to, taking that terrible decision off of the shoulders of those he loved.
My father never intended to continue living that way, as an extension of expensive machines designed to keep him alive, regardless of what inhumane reason “the corporation” gave for rationing their resources.
My father died with great dignity, on his own terms, while the healthcare “corporation” which mismanaged his care, killed the trust and confidence placed in them by patients and their families.
Thirty years later, that callousness, and the placing of profit-making over patient-mending, has brought the decades-deep rage against corporate medicine to a dangerous boil.
