Raymond “Robin” Feierabend wrote a heck of a letter to the Bristol Herald Courier about how alarming it is that Ron Ramsey and Beth Harwell are pushing off dealing with our healthcare crisis until some magical day in the future when there are rainbow farting unicorns.

Feierabend says, "To deny 280,000 Tennesseans (over half of whom are employed) access to affordable health care coverage that they need today, based purely on hypothetical future situations, makes no sense; it is neither economically nor morally justifiable."

I have often wondered about this. If you and I were sitting in a room and someone burst in and said, "My brother needs to go to the hospital! Help!" I think we would both jump up and try to get the guy's brother to the hospital. If someone came in and said, "I need you to make a decision. Can my brother go to the hospital?" I still would like to think that our impulse would be to say, "Yes, of course. We're not going to stand around and see if your brother dies."

The truth is that every day these Tennesseans are uninsured is a day that some of them don't go to the doctor when they should, when they let a strange lump go, because it's not really bothering them, or they don't go get stitched up or get checked for a concussion. They ignore minor problems now that will become severe problems later. Every day these folks don't have insurance, more of them are shifting into the "Gonna die early" category. This isn't hyperbole. It's just a fact. We're so massively curtailing people's options that some of them are going to pay with their lives.

More than most of us, I think our state legislators know that. And yet, as Feierabend points out, when they weigh these lives against political gain, they choose political gain. You can have healthcare when you give Ron Ramsey a Republican president. In the face of real people suffering, it sounds Tony Soprano-ish. You want your life, you give Ramsey what he wants.

I don't think Ron Ramsey is a sociopath like Tony Soprano. But I think this is the real danger in having that much power. How could a person make any kind of decision if he or she genuinely had to know that people's lives were on the line? If you truly understood that your decision to withhold healthcare was going to kill people, our state legislators would have the same kinds of problems we see in military personnel who pilot drones. The physical removed from the killing doesn't lessen the burden of it.

But you can put up mental blocks. Little ways of allowing yourself to not see the suffering in your wake. Like, maybe instead of seeing your responsibility as being to all people who live in Tennessee, you start talking about your responsibility to the "taxpayers" (as if everyone in Tennessee isn't a taxpayer) or to the "voters" or to the "people in your district" or "job creators" or all the words you use to mean "the subset of people I can reasonably care about, do my job, feel like a good person, and keep my sanity."

We don't elect politicians so that they can do only as much of their jobs as are easy and feel good. If some of them have truly lost sight of the people of Tennessee as people, then it's time for them to step down.