Social Issues

I had a patient that came to my office and she brought her son with her.

He had sustained a small cut on his face. He had been seen in the ER, and was advised to follow up with a plastic surgeon because of the nature of the injury.

The patient had a hard time looking for a physician, in particular a plastic surgeon who would accept the child’s insurance, which was Medicaid. Anyway, I looked at the child and took care of the problem. During the treatment, I was discussing with the mother and is just so happened that she started mentioning her own life in general.

She was a very young single mother, who had a five year old son. She expressed that she was working very hard to make both ends meet.

She was working two jobs, and still was not able to afford housing or a car. She was working fourteen hours a day to generate some revenue but was still living with her mother.

This in my opinion is a very sad state of affairs. How could this be happening in one of the world’s richest countries? To the country that is known as “the land of opportunity.”

Is this “opportunity” only meant for the rich? If that is the case, then who is going to look out for the middle class? The woman agreed that she hadn’t worked very hard as a child or teenager and ended up dropping out of school. At the same time, she said she was now working very hard to make up for that time.

So this brings up an interesting question: why can’t we have a social system that actually rewards people for working hard? Yes, she did not go to school. Yes, she was a drop out. But on the other hand, she is now at this state, working very, very hard. I mean fourteen hours a day… that is a lot of work to do.

Why can’t we have such a social setup that helps these people? The income and the amount of time she is investing… I see no reason why she should not be able to afford housing for herself, where she can enjoy her privacy and not be a burden to her parents.

I hope we can find the leadership and a commitment from our politicians to work hard on these social issues. We should not be a country which measures success by the number of millionaires, or billionaires, we have in this country. Not at the cost of the middle class, or the poor, hard-working people.

Perhaps a better way of estimating a country’s wealth should be whether or not we can say “We are the richest country in the world because even our poor, hard-working people have a place to live, have health insurance, and can kept themselves warm in the winter.”