When you study families in financial trouble, you get to see hurt from a lot of different directions. Monday I spent all day at FDIC hearings on sub-prime mortgages, and Tuesday I spent four hours in House Judiciary hearings on medical debt and bankruptcy.
One sub-theme united the two hearings. Defenders of the status quo claimed that there is plenty of protection under the current law and that any efforts to change the law would impair the free market, making things worse for everyone. No need to change the law to deal with subprime mortgages, national healthcare or bankruptcy. Defenders of families said the experience on the ground is very different, and that hard-working people are getting pummeled.
The stories about what is happening to middle class families were agonizingly similar. At the FDIC, witnesses who work to help families in mortgage foreclosure told about mortgage brokers who falsified documentation, lied and cheated customers, and about mortgage companies that were hell-bent on collecting, even if it meant losses in foreclosure. At the House Judiciary Committee, Mrs. Donna Smith gave compelling testimony about how hard she and her husband struggled to pay their medical bills, and how health care providers told them that if they couldn’t pay, not to come back. Her story was backed up by Dr. Himmelstein of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Mark Rukivina of The Access Project, both of whom cited study after study showing how people are struggling to pay medical bills and that people die when they cannot pay for health care. I added the data on medical bankruptcies.
We often talk here about differences in philosophies for the role of government, but that isn’t the discussion. Instead, the defenders of the status quo and those who want change are describing different realities — but only one of them is living it.
In “Thank You For Smoking,” the hero-lobbyist offers the pithy advice that all that’s needed to neutralize a grim reality is to tell an alternate story, claim the data are “controversial,” and the resulting gridlock will prevent meaningful change.
The stories in both hearings sounded as if they came from two different worlds. Maybe they did — one from the world of those who profit from the system as it is and the other from the world where much of middle class America lives.
