Ronnie Polaneczky: Maybe, when it comes to health care, we all just got lucky

LAST WEEK, I wrote that America has a decades-old national health-care plan that goes by a familiar name.

It's called luck.

If you're healthy and well-employed, this plan totally rocks. If you work for a company that offers good medical benefits, and if your job pays well enough that you can afford all the unreimbursed prescriptions, tests and co-pays, thank your lucky stars, you're good with the plan.

All you have to do is stay healthy, don't get cancer, don't fall on your head and don't ever lose that job with all its great benefits. Then you'll probably get through this life OK.

Basically, this health-care plan works very well for everyone who is lucky enough to never really need it.

The thing about luck is that it can skip out on you without warning. A lot of Americans who considered themselves very lucky a few years ago don't feel that way now.

Some have gotten very sick, and had their coverage taken from them because the illness has been deemed a "pre-existing condition." Others who thought they had full medical coverage discovered that there's a lifetime cap on the benefits that they're entitled to, and that they'll have to bankrupt their families just to get well.

And millions have lost those lucky jobs, so they're praying that they don't get sick before their luck returns in the form of a new job.

That's why, on Sunday, 219 members of the U.S. House voted to reform this health-care plan. They figured out that maybe it's time to take the luck out of who among us gets adequate medical treatment.

One thing that's great about America is that it truly is a land of boundless opportunity, where millions have made their dreams come true through dedication and hard work. Another great American tradition is how we've leveled the playing field whenever it seems like luck is playing too big a role in deciding who gets to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Take the Africans brought here as slaves, who - talk about bad luck - were born with the wrong skin color. No amount of hard work on their masters' plantations would give them a shot at the freedom enjoyed by their owners, who were lucky enough to have been born white.

It took everything from a bloody civil war to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before America acknowledged that skin color should have no impact on a person's right to equality.

Those unlucky enough to be born female couldn't vote in every state until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 ensured their place at the polls. Nor were they entitled to earn what their lucky male counterparts did until The Equal Pay Act of 1963 recognized that your biological equipment shouldn't have a role in determining the value of your work.

And when it became clear that aging Americans were losing access to health care because they had the bad luck to grow old, Congress created Medicare. Almost five decades later, the government-run program is such a given in this country, people forget that the American Medical Association fought Medicare's passage for more than a decade, and even hired an actor named Ronald Reagan as its spokesman in the fight against "socialized medicine."

So, philosophically, why was the health-care vote so divisive? Why do those who enjoy access to excellent health care begrudge relief to the unlucky?

Part of the problem is that they don't think there's enough luck to go around.

But the real problem is that when you've been lucky in a certain way for a long time, you begin to think that you've earned that luck. You stop thinking about those less fortunate than you, because it reminds you how fickle luck is.

I think it's a failure of imagination. Maybe these folks have been so lucky for so long, they simply don't see themselves as fortunate. Maybe they believe that some combination of moral superiority and uncommon work ethic - instead of luck - has allowed them to avoid tragedy. Maybe they truly feel that, if others would only work harder or straighten up and fly right, happy lives could be theirs as well.

I'm lucky for many reasons, but it's a stroke of luck that I work in a business where, on good days, I get to cast some light on people who have missed out, in hope that I can help turn their luck around.

When I write about a couple gone bankrupt because of medical costs incurred keeping their sick child alive, I imagine their despair. And I want to help.

When I hear of a laid-off husband who can't buy private health insura
 
nce for his wife because of her pre-existing breast cancer, I feel his desperation
 
in my gut
 
. And I want to help.

I think, deep down, most Americans feel the same way. But fear of not getting what they might need for themselves keeps many from yielding to empathy. Not bleeding-heart suckerdom for those who'd game the system, but real empathy for those whose luck has run out.

Because we can imagine what life would be like if ours did, too.

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ronnieblog.