The Republic of T.

Competing Voices

During Take Back America 2008, I spent part of a day running around with a camera and a microphone asking people which issue was most important to them in the upcoming election. Just when I thought I was done, the camera turned to me and I was faced with the same question.

My answer came quickly and easily: health care reform. When I explained why, the argument that came out of my mouth was based more in morality than economics.

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“We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

“Sixty years after Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural, that egalitarian test, I think, is still the best measure of our progress and humanity, and the core of The Triumph of Meanness is the contention that as a nation we are failing that test.”

Nicolaus Mills, The Triumph of Meanness – America’s War Against Its Better Self.

Home of the Mean

As with the election of Barack Obama last fall, the health care reform debate presents us with another opportunity to decide what kind of country we want to be. But that making that choice requires an unvarnished look at the country we have become.

In the seventy-plus years since Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural, and the dozen years since Nicolaus Mills’ offered his assessment that “as a nation we are failing” at “providing enough for those who have too little,” we have actually become a country where a surprising number believe that those who have too little don’t deserve to have any more than they do. It’s a phenomenon at play in our reactions to any number of current crises, including health care reform.

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“I don’t understand you Americans. You blow billions on a useless war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and billions more to bail out banks that nearly bankrupted the world economy, but you don’t ensure healthcare for your own people. Even Obama can’t make a difference. It’s as if your democracy doesn’t work anymore.”

Anonymous Man in Budapest

Where There’s a Will

In the first post in this series, I recalled saying something to the effect of “In a country as wealthy as this one, that a single child doesn’t have health insurance or health care is criminal.” The implication is the same implied in the words above, said to Steven Hill by an anonymous European man in a Budapest sauna, after Hill identified himself as an American.

According to Hill, the man’s reaction was typical of Europeans observing our political paroxysms over health care.

He was Austrian but spoke in a near-perfect English that was as good grammatically as that spoken by some of my relatives.

And his reaction was typical. As Europeans watch the United States flailing about over something as basic as healthcare, they are reminded once again of the impotent US response following Hurricane Katrina. TV images of stranded, poor, black people in New Orleans have been melded to those of this new healthcare insurgency with pitch forks, leaving an indelible impression. The last remaining superpower is not looking so super anymore, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, the economy – not anywhere.

Can you blame them for wondering why an issue like access to quality, affordable health care for all citizens — a no-brainer to them — is difficult for us that it’s taken almost 100 years for us to get something that their countries got long ago? Can you blame them for wondering if it’s because we can’t do it or because we just don’t want to do it?

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…[Q]uality care shouldn’t depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face. Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.

This is the cause of my life.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, ‘The Cause of My Life’

As I noted in the previous post in this series, it can’t honestly be said that the reason millions of American’s go without health insurance is because we can’t afford it. Nor is that the reason why more than 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day, or why:

• 25 million are underinsured — up from 16 million in 2003 — and pay more than 10 percent of their income on medical expenses despite having health insurance
• nearly 86 million Americans under 65 went without health insurance at some point between 2007 and 2008
• 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance, and thus access to care

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None of this is because these people don’t want health insurance, and certainly not because they don’t need it. Nor is it that we cannot afford to guarantee quality, affordable health care to all citizens. A fraction of our military budget, or the amount sunk into the Iraq war, for example, could go a long way towards providing coverage for many. So it’s not because we can’t do it.

We can. So, perhaps we simply lack the will to do so; to make it happen. Maybe we just don’t want to. But the question remains: Why?

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“The fundamental truth about health care in every country is that national values, national character, determine how each system works.”

Prof. Uwe Reinhardt, Princeton Professor & Health Care Economist

“I think health care is a privilege. I wouldn’t call it a right.”

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC

Drop Dead

Whether or not it’s a crisis that millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, that thousands lose their health insurance every day, or that tens of thousands die every year because they lack health insurance is a matter of perspective. The same goes for the economic crisis, the foreclosure crisis, or any other crisis.

Depending on your perspective, there’s nothing wrong with hundreds of thousands, or even millions losing their homes to foreclosure. (Even if deregulating the finance sector made it easier to sell them time bombs, in the form of mortgages, that went off long after the people who really matter made an easy buck and moved on.) There’s nothing wrong with millions of people having no health insurance, and thus no access to affordable, quality care. There’s nothing wrong, because it’s all right, and there’s no need to do anything about it.

That’s why I have to disagree with the following assertion, from Simon Johnson and James Kwak.

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(The sixth in of a series of seven.)

Nothing in Common

If the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is true, then a couple of images might sum up the debate of over health care reform, and prove representative of the opposing sides.

[Via Preemptive Karma.]

[Via Wikimedia Commons.]

President Obama also defined it during his speech to the joint houses of Congress: that debate over health care reform is really a debate — and a struggle, even — over the moral character of the nation. In other words, it’s another part of the process of choosing what kind of country we want to be.

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The fury and dialogue catalyzed by Joe Lieberman’s unsurprising treachery on health care reform — along with futile efforts to court Olympia Snowe, and the dealmaking with Ben Nelson and other “Blue Dog” Democrats — underscores a Democratic division and a political reality progressives must take seriously. The division is one between progressives and Democrats.

The reality is that not all Democrats are progressive. The health care reform debate is illustrative of this divide, and the challenge progressives face with this political reality.

The difference depends on what you believe concerning health care. Is it an injustice that millions of Americans have little or no access to quality, affordable health care? Or is it merely unfortunate?

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