Our American character

What is it about the "American character" that allows the kind of looney-tunes debate now taking place around our attempts create a rational health care system? 

This debate goes back to the beginnings of modern medicine, which came at a price. The first insurance companies, in the thirties, were more like philanthropic organizations for groups like the Elks. It was the fixed wages of WWII  that made employer-supplied insurance a way for GM and others to attract needed workers. 

President Truman tried to deliver universal health care as a natural extension of Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," but a resurgent Republican party branded the policy, and him, as "communist." And it certainly helped that once the big employers realized how big that pool of insurance money was, there was no way they were going to give it up.

After decades of health care under this model we have a body of evidence that's pretty hard to ignore -- unless you want to. Consider:

• We are the only industrialized country in the world without a universal public health system (link).
• We pay almost twice as much per capita for the care we do get,
• Spend a much lager percentage of GDP,
• And our life expectancy is towards the bottom of the pack (link)
• Last year, in more that 62% of US bankruptcies, medical bills were the main cause, 
• And most of those people had life insurance (link)

And it's not as if this information is difficult to find. A few minutes with Google will give you hundreds of studies and sources that tell the same story.


Even more confounding, as reported by Robert Creamer,  "a poll conducted for Americans United for Change by the respected firm of Anzelone and Liszt -- completed last Friday -- shows that, by a 62% to 28% margin, likely 2010 voters would be more inclined to support President Obama's healthcare reform plan if it included a public option that gave people a choice between private insurance plans and a public health insurance plan."

An excellent piece in Slate by Timothy Noah, "A Short History of Health Care," makes the observation there is are two realities in this discussion: 

"The trouble with the policy debate that's slowly beginning to emerge as the medical-industrial complex spins out of control is that it pays maximum deference to Reality 2 (political reality) and minimum deference to Reality 1 (the thing itself). "

The take-away is that our legislative system is not, in itself, democratic. Specifically, the Senate's function is to blunt the voice of the people. It was formed to protect the interests of the large land-owners (who were also largely slave owners at the time). In the past few decades the Senate has been also become the guardian of the large corporate interests, and there is almost no corporate interest larger than the alliance of insurers and pharma. The fact is that a relatively small number of Senators can effectively block any action that threatens their corporate allies. Rep. Jim Wilson (a protegee of Strom Thurmond) calls the President a liar and immediately raises a half million dollars (which is about what he received the last few years from insurance companies).

Add to that a few entertainers who see an opportunity to build an audience, and have no compunction to ignore the factual evidence, and you can motivate a few thousand disgruntled (if not exactly unified) partisans to assemble and grab a few minutes in the media spotlight.

The fact is there are many people unhappy with the political process. From the left side of the spectrum we it looks like our modern Know-Nothing, troglodyte party is about to take down the one chance we may have to  create a rational health care system. But it ain't over yet.

For one thing, the American character may not be patient. It may want instant decisions, and not much palaver. We want the 80-yard touchdown play. Every time. But it seems we have a specific character in the White House who is comfortable enough with the reality of the thing as it is that he's willing to outwait the opposition, to stay with a strategy that is realistic about strengths and weaknesses and the critical importance of this opportunity.

It just might be that because of a singular American character, history, and time, is on our side.

Old Habits, Old Fears

According to an article in today's LA Times, President Obama is losing support among a particular group of voters -- those who consider themselves "white." The reason for this drop, according to the article, is Obama's policy stands. Oh, really?

I beg to differ. To anyone who watches TV or reads the news, the dominant voices have not been policy wonks engaged in a rational discussion of specific proposals and likely alternatives. The voices I've heard have been loud, angry, pushed beyond reason. The words generally reflect the chatter coming from Fox and the radio rightocracy, and that chatter has been focused on the "otherness" of Obama. In other words, his blackness.

No matter what issue is raising the right's ire, the argument comes back to "it's bad because it's Obama. You just can't trust him." That's why the health plan must be called "Obamacare," even though the plan is being written in the House, or the current version of the bailout, first cobbled together by Bush apparatchiks, must be called "Obamanomics." It's the frame, and it's all the right seems to have.

It is also racist. And it's working, if the poll released today is accurate, and if you think raising suspicion among white folks about Obama's otherness can be called "working."

Just to be clear, let me provide a brief but workable definition of "racist."

• First of all, I use it to refer to actions and to speech, not to intention (because I really can't know anyone else's intentions, only their actions). 
• Second, a word or action is racist when it ignores the individuality of any person, and judges them as a member of a group, as if every member of the group can be assumed to share those characteristics. 
• The more negatively you view the group, and those characteristics, the more invidious the racist word or deed.

Racism is, then, the denial of human individuality. It does not belong to any one culture or skin color, and there is probably no one who does not sometimes at least use racist language or thoughts. To me, the only thing that matters is how we respond when a racist word or deed is pointed out. This is not about guilt (one of my recurring themes), it is about taking responsibility for being a human being on this planet trying to coexist with other, separate and only partly knowable human beings.

There have been times and places when humans protected their families or villages by shunning the "other," by seeing them as less human than us, easier to reject, to enslave, to eliminate. That is a perfect definition of ignorance. But we live in a world where the interconnectedness between families, villages, nations makes ignorance a liability. We have learned too much about plague, war, and global financial breakdown. It's time to leaves those old habits and fears behind.

Once again, we are talking I suppose about intelligence, and the ongoing responsibility to see the world as it is, to push ourselves beyond our preconceptions and prejudices. I'm trying to do my best, and to make it easier for others to do a little better and realize their best as we glimpse and appreciate the ways we are ALL connected.

Happy Labor Day.