This should NEVER happen in a moral nation
by David Atkins
A restaurant owner found out that one of his 19-year-old employees with no health insurance has a brain tumor. So he’s selling his restaurant in part to pay for her healthcare.
Along Highway 105 in Montgomery, you’ll find the Kaiserhof Restaurant and Wunderbar. You’ll also find a waitress extraordinaire named Brittany Mathis. “I have my good days and my bad,” said Mathis.
The 19-year-old employee doesn’t look or sound sick, but she is — and everyone at the authentic German restaurant knows it. It started with a rash on her leg. “I went to the hospital and found out it was my blood clotting,” Mathis told us.“So, they wanted to keep me and do CAT scans and MRIs and the next day they came in and told me I had a tumor.”
Mathis doesn’t have insurance and hasn’t yet signed up for Affordable Healthcare. The medical bills are piling up and she can’t even afford to find out if the tumor is benign or malignant. That’s where her boss comes in.
“I just can’t be standing by and doing nothing,” said Kaiserhof owner Michael De Beyer. “I have to try something because it’s not right.” So De Beyer has decided to sell his family’s 6,000 square foot restaurant and donate money to Mathis.
“Here’s a family, they really work hard they have a lot of stuff against them in the past and they are not holding their hand open they didn’t even ask anybody for help,” said De Beyer.
The owner was looking to sell, anyway, so this might be something of a publicity stunt or not. I don’t know enough to know.
But let’s assume the best of motives here. A conservative looks at this situation and says, “see? This is good old-fashioned American can-do spirit, where charity trumps government intervention.” Frank Luntz would be pleased. But a moral human being is appalled that 19-year-olds should have to either pay some corporation far too much money on the slight chance they get hurt or sick, or rely on the good graces of people like De Beyer to help them if they’re feeling charitable enough.
It’s also worth noting that while there are many incentives for 19-year-olds to have health insurance either themselves or through their parents under the Affordable Care Act, a great many will still go uninsured even under the most favorable of circumstances. These sorts of stories will still be happening a decade from now even if all goes well with the ACA.
A moral nation would never let situations like this occur again. To most citizens of stable democracies around the world, these stories sound like the product of a barbaric and retrograde developing country.
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