A Pox on Both Your Houses

Let me preface my vitriol by noting that I have been waiting almost 30 years for our country to elect a leader wise enough to shepherd some type of health insurance reform through Congress. I voted for Barack Obama at least in part under the assumption that he could be that man, and I remain somewhat confident that this year a common sense health bill will still become the law of the land.

But listening to the public debate over the past few weeks, I am inclined to wish a pox on the houses of both the supporters and opponents of changes to our health care system. More ominously, the nature of the discussion has me fearing for the future of our Republic.

I believe in freedom. The freedom to lead our lives, to raise our families, and to openly engage in public debate is why this country is still worth dying (and killing) for. But one of those freedoms should be the freedom to get sick, or more specifically the reassurance to know that you will be cared for if you are unlucky enough to become ill. That is a freedom that many of us don’t have. Not even counting the millions of uninsured Americans, I think most of us at one time or another have kept a job that we hated at least in part because we did not want to lose our health care coverage. The stark reality is that we have become a society of shriveled minds and aborted potential, and our country’s employer-based health insurance system has played at least a small role in this shrinking, as the perils of the Cook County Hospital or the L.A. public health care system hang over our necks like Damocles’ sword.

So, let’s start with a few common sense proposals, all of which the Obama Administration has proposed and all of which would make the lives of almost everyone in this country a whole lot better: When someone leaves or loses their job, they should be able to keep their health care coverage. Insurance companies shouldn’t be able to deny coverage to anyone because of “pre-existing conditions”. For those of us who are either self-employed, work for small businesses, or are between jobs, there should be some type of insurance exchange where we can find and buy the right kind of insurance to meet our needs. While medical care shouldn’t be free, it should be affordable, and we as a society should find a way for everyone to be able to buy into some type of basic plan.

Just about everyone is in favor of these things. You think that it wouldn’t be that hard to pass a bill that provides them to the American people. But instead, what we’ve witnessed in the public square over the past few weeks is a display of our internal ugliness, of selfishness, ignorance, paranoia, and delusion on one side, and of thinly-disguised paternalism and cultural imperialism on the other.

Because they are the easier target, let’s start with the right wing nut jobs carrying around firearms and pictures of the President photoshopped into Adolf Hitler to what are billed as “town hall meetings”. Actually, the behavior of these goof balls doesn’t surprise me. We’ve become well acquainted over the past couple of decades with the lunatic fringe of the right wing in this country and their tactics. Do the words “Oklahoma City” mean anything to you? Rather, I’m surprised that a modern version of the Black Panthers hasn’t stepped forward to confront these S.O.B.’s head-on. But then, the race war all these wigged-out crackers have fantasized about will be on, so we should probably thank all the black activists for their restraint.

If you bother to sort through all the “death camp” mumbo jumbo being bandied about by the opponents to health care reform, what’s left is a bunch of mewling by folks on Medicare or Medicaid, worried that they will no longer be able to get elective hip surgery for free, or that the copays for their son with some rare genetic disorder will go up. In essence, they are saying: “I’ve got mine, so screw you.” The reality is that Medicare and Medicaid will break this country over the next quarter century if we don’t do something about it, just like excessive government entitlements are well on the way to breaking most of the economies of Western Europe.

My wife Melissa works at a nursing home, and she marvels at the ridiculous expenditures being paid for by Medicaid, like giving calcium pills or cholesterol medicine to a 92-year old who has nine months to live. Everyone from the nursing homes to the drug companies make money off this system, and the bureaucrats running it don’t want to upset a constituency, so they rubber stamp a lot of this stuff. Almost like it wasn’t their money (OK, it’s not, it’s actually ours, or more accurately our children’s and grandchildren’s, as we will just add it to the burgeoning debt that they already owe on our behalf).

To me, the symbol for all this waste is the motorized “scooter” that Medicare will buy for folks when they reach the point of no longer being able to get around on their own. Have you seen those ads on TV where some old woman is being presented with a new scooter? “For most patients, this will be paid for entirely out of Medicare,” the commercial assures us. Then you see the old lady in the commercial doing a 360 with her new scooter, a smile beaming on her face. Talk to anyone in the health care profession. These scooters are generally a big waste of money. Once a patient’s body is so degraded that they can no longer use a walker to get around, their minds tend to be in similar shape, and they have little or no ability to control their new scooter, which will soon either sit in a corner gathering dust or be returned to the seller.

But here is Howard Dean boasting about how, whatever else happens to the health care bill, the Democrats are going to see to it that included in the bill is an expansion of government-run healthcare, even if that means just an expansion of Medicare. Screw all the parts of the bill that will actually help the average American, Howard Dean and his ilk will jettison that in order to expand the government’s role in our lives, whether we want it or not. If, as you get older, you need a motorized scooter or hip replacement surgery, they’ll see to it that you are not denied, and then send the bill to your children to pay, twenty years down the line.

Like I said, I believe in freedom. And all of those advocating a “public option” regarding the country’s health care are advocating anything but. Rather, they are offering us more servitude to our government, gratitude to the politicians spending away our children’s futures, and a legacy of debt. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that when a doo-gooder starts talking about how he is going to improve the world for the rest of us, it is time to grab your wallet and run.

But more than just healthcare, it is the entire American ethic that is in trouble here. I certainly cannot advocate the tactics nor the positions of most opponents to President Obama’s health care proposals. But neither can I relate to all the East Coast social engineers out to “improve” society.

I trace the roots of our current “culture war” back to the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. In 1896, Bryan was a defining Populist, out to topple the East Coast moneyed interests then running the country. He wanted to support the little man, he wanted to stop America from becoming an imperial power, and he wanted to break the hegemony that the Wall Street banks had on our economy. And he almost became President, except the Republicans in power found a cultural wedge to separate Bryan from the immigrant communities in the big cities who should have been a natural constituency, portraying Bryan as a hayseed who can’t be trusted. It worked. Instead, most of the recent immigrants in the cities voted for William McKinley, a supporter of corporate monopolies and global adventurism. America got a friend of the Wall Street bankers in the White House. We got the Spanish-American War, and new colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

In “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, Thomas Frank portrays a rural underclass convinced to ignore it’s own economic interests through the ruse of a cultural war. In reality, the state of America is just the opposite. Most of us urban Americans value our freedoms above almost anything. We picture ourselves as “urban pioneers”, happy to engage with all the various cultures around us, proud of our independent spirit. Unfortunately, we’ve been bamboozled by a class of political apparatchiks who run our governments and who’ve convinced us that their opponents are a bunch of hayseeds, not to be trusted.

And certainly, someone like Sarah Palin is not to be trusted. She encompasses all that is wrong with America’s populist tradition: it’s willful ignorance, it’s knee-jerk defiance, and a cultural inferiority complex that plays itself out as an almost comic bluster.

But it is all these self-righteous folks from places like upscale Vermont who are to blame for her success. They are the ones who have, as a political strategy, intentionally marginalized a huge chunk of the country. White evangelical Christians are about 35% of our population. Guess how much of the student body they make up at Yale. Or Harvard. Or any Ivy League school. In most cases, it is well down into the single digits. If a white evangelical Christian makes it to a major university, the chances are good that he has done it on a football scholarship. An evangelical girl? Well, I guess there’s always women’s crew. The odds are probably better that a white evangelical makes it into the NFL than that he makes it into Harvard. It’s easier for him to compete against some black dude who can run a 4.5 40 than it is to fight the social and economic headwinds working against him. Is it any wonder that they are suspicious of the decisions made by this country’s elite? It is a club in which they are not welcome. While promoting “affirmative action”, we’ve become increasingly comfortable throwing them and their belief system under the bus. Little wonder that they now threaten to respond with guns and bile.