A couple weeks ago I got really ill. I was on the road, thousands of miles from home and my doctor and I had no idea what to do. I had been really sick all day and I thought it was an emergency, but would my insurance company?

If I went to the emergency room and the auditors at Blue Cross/Blue Shield decided that it wasn’t, I could be stuck with a couple thousand dollars worth of bills.

I’ve been down this road before. When I was in high school I took a puck to the foot during a hockey game and my parents had to drive me clear across town to the urgent care because they weren’t sure if a broken foot was worthy of a visit to the emergency room.

It’s been hard to miss the legions of people shouting down their representatives across the country in town hall meetings, supposedly voicing their opinions about the health care reform.

Whether you believe these protests are genuine or not is irrelevant, because these people, for one reason or another, are pissed.

Republicans, special interest groups and the right-wing media have seized on it and are stoking the fire. Of the many ridiculous claims whipping people into a fervor is the idea of so-called “death panels.”

Many of the talking point memos floating around from Republican lawmakers and insurance lobbyists claim that all surgeries, prescriptions and other medical procedures will have to be cleared by panels of bureaucrats.

Among the millions of things these people seem to not understand about the way our medical system already works is that such panels already exist. They’re called insurance auditors, claims processors and boards of directors.

Insurance companies couldn’t give a shit about your well-being, they want to provide a service and protect their profit margin and they have large groups of lawyers and accountants who use software processing algorithm after algorithm to decide whether or not a broken foot or severe dehydration (both of which I’ve visited the emergency room for) are emergencies worthy of a claim.

Now, supposing that these claims about Obama death panels being true — how would it be any different than what we have now?

For one, maybe this poor lady in California would have gotten the proper cancer treatment. Instead of getting a treatment that specialists claim would have given her the best chance to beat brain cancer (real brain cancer, not fake brain cancer like the lady from the Republican anti-health care reform ad.)

All that aside, whether you agree with the details of the current health care reform bill, there’s no doubt that some sort of reform is needed and the millions of people in this country who go through their days just praying not to get sick or hurt must have some sort of safety net, some sort of guarantee of health care.

Sadly, this issue isn’t about health care as much as it is about a vendetta against all things Democrat. For the right to shoot this down, they believe, would be to cripple President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. The right is playing politics with the health and well-being of millions of our most vulnerable countrymen.