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How
Far We've Fallen
Americans
are losing their self reliance. Just compare the
life of hardworking, 102-year-old "Granny"
Grubb with Medicaid's latest: free stomach stapling
for the obese.
If
you want an illustration of how far we’ve come
from a culture of self-reliance to one of
dependency, contrast the recent newspaper profile of
Lura Grubb of southwestern Virginia
with the news
reports about the federal government’s decision to
extend Medicare coverage to the treatment of
obesity. It’s
not a pretty picture.
Lura
Grubb — “Granny” to just about everyone who
knows her — is a 102-year-old mother of seven who
just this year moved into a house with indoor
plumbing for the first time in her life.
Her life story was profiled in a July article
in The
Roanoke Times written by Donna Alvis-Banks.
Granny
Grubb raised her children virtually alone in the
mountains of Pulaski
County
without
indoor plumbing and, for many years, without
electricity. She
worked for 50 cents a day in a cornfield, saving
enough for a down payment on a house and 30 acres.
To make the loan payments, she traded land
for a cow that could generate income through milk
sales. Her
husband, Walter, sold the cow to buy liquor.
Things
got worse. Walter
shot and killed Granny’s mother in a drunken rage,
resulting in a murder conviction and nine years in
prison. Granny
divorced him, but refused to accept alimony saying,
“I’ve always supported myself.”
And she continued to do so by walking to work
in nearby factories and selling her own handcrafted
quilts, crochet and bedspreads.
The
Grubb household depended on mountain springs for
drinking water, rain barrels for washing and what
could be produced from a garden, an orchard and
their own livestock for their food.
They were faithful churchgoers.
When times were especially hard, the Grubb
family was sustained by a caring rural community.
At
age 102 and experiencing a decline in her health,
Granny sold her mountain home for a modern house in
Radford near her daughter.
Her new life of relative ease is just
beginning.
At
about the time Granny was moving into her new
residence, the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services was announcing that ailments associated
with obesity would be paid for with taxpayers’
funds. This
will include gastric bypass surgery, which costs
between $25,000 and $50,000.
Some would call this a “core governmental
service.”
Whatever
happened to personal responsibility?
Forget the responsibility members of a family
or close community once felt for each other.
We no longer expect every individual to take
control of his or her own life or assume the
consequences of foolish decisions.
Much
of what the government now pays for in health care
is associated with poor life choices and risky
behavior. Compounding
this burden is the cost of government welfare
programs that have expanded to deal with problems
related to family breakdown.
The
more government does for citizens, the less
families, religious congregations, local voluntary
organizations and other private institutions are
expected to do. Medicaid,
for example, encourages the elderly to look for
assistance first from government rather than from
these voluntary groups.
Whether this is an inevitable or a wise
public policy, its adverse impact on our social
fabric and the resilience of our citizenry is
obvious.
The
hidden costs of our modern public policy are the
erosion of individual accountability, a decline in
personal initiative and an expansion of
self-perpetuating government programs.
Somewhere on the road to total dependency on
government, shouldn’t we stop and ask whether our
well-intended government programs are worth the loss
of the culture of self-reliance that sustained us
for so long?
-- August
23,
2004
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