It's high time for this.
Instead of screaming and ranting and protesting with grammatically unfortunate, hand-sharpied signs, I'm going to try and work through all of this without getting too frustrated and with a healthy dose of self-criticism and devil's advocacy.
Frustrated is great place to start. I've been listening to the running debate about health care (and, by extension welfare, medicare, and all the other "socialisty" programs) and all it does is frustrate me. It seemed that all parties involved were incapable of slowing down long enough to give a reasoned explanation of their views. Then it occurred to me: it's not that most people are incapable of slowing down, but it is the case that most people are incapable of giving a reasoned explanation of their views. It's such a cataclysm of human problems that I barely know how to start sorting it out.
Fear.
Arrogance.
Ignorance.
Selfishness.
Lack of Empathy.
Lack of Perspective.
Censoriousness.
Pride.
Snobbery.
Elitism.
Exclusivity.
Condescension.
Stupidity.
Stupidity.
Stupidity.
Stupidity.
I'm honestly to the point where I don't believe we're a nation of people smart enough to have this discussion. (Refer to the above list of negative traits and check off how many I'm guilty of as I go.) I do understand the conservative government-theory position. Involving government in anything means they will never become uninvolved. Government needs to intervene only where absolutely necessary. Writing laws is a good way to bullocks up the efficiency of any organizational structure. Better to let private companies build structures that are the most efficient because they are the most profitable. Don't interfere with the individual's freedom of choice.
This is all valuable stuff, to an extent...but I seriously doubt that more than 5% of the anti-reform movement has any of this in mind when they go off half-cocked anywhere and everywhere they feel like it.
It's become clear to me that the outspoken protesters are of an ilk that, for the most part, has led comfortable, middle class lives and have barely ever, if ever, traveled outside their social neighborhood. By social neighborhood, I mean their socio-economic environment. They've not lived with or gotten to know anybody that makes significantly less than them, and they've long dreamed of and idealized the lives of those that make significantly more.
I understand, loud, angry people, that you don't want good coverage taken away from you. What you fail to understand, loud, angry people, is that the changes being proposed have nothing to do with your coverage! Have you ever dealt with being uninsured? No. Have you ever dealt with health insurance being prohibitively expensive? No. Have you ever been unable to get health insurance at any price because you happen to have a disease that insurance companies don't want to cover? No again. Have you ever gotten acutely or terminally ill only to have your insurance summarily yanked because the insurance company sics their agents on your life, finds and error on your application, and says you defrauded them? Absolutely not. And you would be horrified if any of this happened to you. But it hasn't happened to you, so anybody that can't get insurance is just a freeloader, or a slug, or a cheat, or illegal, right?
Dear God, it provokes me to violence.
I've actually faced all of the above, except, thankfully, facing the trauma of having my coverage rescinded in the face of horrendously expensive coverage. I'm a middle class, college-educated white male with a wife, a kid, and a "good, mid-western work ethic". I look like you, screamers. I talk like you. I identify with your cultural heritage. The status quo you want to preserve would gleefully hang me out to dry for the sake of some cranky shareholders.
This is the issue. Your coverage is fine, and You, Middle America, are so trained to covet your material prosperity that you foam at the mouth if anything might even hint at threatening it. And the conservative talk radio gasbags know this. And they have beaten you into a mindless froth about it. And we're off the rails on the crazy train. The reality is that there's a whole other America out there that doesn't live your life, and they're getting raped by a colossus of an industry that is so amorally and unethically seeking profit that it makes me physically ill.
Drug companies chase patents for the sake of marketing exclusivity and profit. Most "new" drugs are simply retools of existing drugs that warrant a fresh patent.
The fee-for-service model of medicine encourages doctors to do as many tests and procedures as possible in order to get paid more. The only thing stopping them from proceduring your bank account to death? Ethical responsibility. Have we not yet witnessed enough shameless amorality to convince us that personal ethics are dead?
The very fact that health care is non-negotiable and urgent discourages the usual free-market control of prices. You're sick, you don't want to get more sick, or die, for that matter, and so you don't often have the luxury of comparison shopping. Nor can you say to the surgeon, "That scalpel costs how much?? Jimminy Christmas! Can you use the number 3 instead of the number 6?" It sounds silly, but the insurance company gets billed for the number 6, at $1200, and you, consumer, the end user, are not participating in the selection of what you're paying for. You're not in control. Does this sound a little like what everybody is screaming about avoiding?
Here's a personal anecdote: I have Crohn's disease. It's chronic, non-lethal, and a nuisance. I can lead a perfectly normal life and am basically healthy, especially if I take the prescribed dose of medication on a regular basis. Easy, yes? Right.
When I was in a situation where I didn't have the benefit of group insurance through an employer (which has been a lot of my adult life, so far) I tried to buy insurance as an individual. No soap. At first, I was quoted outrageous prices, on the order of $800-1000 a month. Then, when the agent did some research, he realized that I was a reject. So even if I'd had the grand per month to spend, nobody would cover me. Why? I was too expensive. Crohn's isn't even big, fat and hairy like cancer or diabetes and the like, but there's a moderate risk that I'll have to have my small intestine "trimmed" at some point. Nobody that's trying to protect their profit margins wants to take on obvious risk. It's just business sense. The problem is that business and medicine don't blend well. Almost to the point of oil/water comparison.
So I couldn't get insurance, but I wanted to keep myself healthy, so that if ever I could get insurance, I wouldn't be maxing out my coverage because of all of the issues I'd developed trying not to go bankrupt while I had none. Well, good luck, son. The medication I take, Pentasa, is a brand name with no generic equivalent. 30 days' supply? In excess of $500 dollars.
Why is this? Because the vicious cycle of insurance payouts and greed have caused everybody to realize that there's no real free-market dynamics in this game. The insured never see the actual cost of the goods and services, so the prices go up and the payouts go up, and the insurance companies get hammered, and start (perfectly legally) cutting people off and literally leaving them to die to keep their overhead down.
Let me hear about these horrible death panels again, Mildred.
You see, angry conservative, the horrible underbelly of your glorious free market is treading out human beings like grapes in a vineyard...All so we can drink the draft of immaculate capitalism.
Now I wax melodramatic. But I think you might begin to see what makes me so angry. There are thousands of people fighting to keep us from having our health care taken away, and those very warriors are keeping thousands of others from having health care at all.
Don't talk to me about death panels. That's horse shit. Don't talk to me about NHS in Britain and socialized medicine in Canada. That's not what we're looking at here. Prove to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why the dreaded single-payer system (which is a long way off, even if proposed legislation "opens the door") is so rotten and terrible and destructive of our American Awesome.
Here's how I see it. Somebody is finally pushing this hard. It happens to be liberals. It so happens that it's expensive, and it so happens that legislation is often fraught with bloat and pork. But by God it's about time something was done about the injustice of the system.
What's that you say? Social help should come from charities and non-profits and religious organizations and not the government?
Yes. Yes they should.
But I'm sorry, American Christianity, you've missed your chance. You want to legislate homosexuality and abortion out of existence because you think that living a virtuous life reaps the benefits of God's blessing. Read your Bibles, you hypocrites. Meanwhile, your precious Republican party, with Jim Dobson riding shot-gun, has whipped you into a frenzy of fear about losing your freedoms and your independence and your Christianity. Dr. Dobson, read your Bible. I happened to catch part of one of your shows that happened to discuss a political theory book of some kind, and I was horrified to hear you speak of how the thought of losing your freedoms kept you up at night. You have millions of Americans in your hip pocket! What god do you worship? Certainly not the God of the Bible, if you believe that you and the church are responsible for preserving a secular nation for God. What a heresy you've committed! Tacitly, you've approved of and encouraged the fear and the feelings of insecurity that millions of Americans are struggling with, even though they purportedly believe in the Sovereign, Providential God that works all things to His ends. He sets up the government and brings it down. The Church is His possession, not the Flag, not the Country, not Capitalism. Wake up! You and all of your followers. We live in a nation of man, not a nation of God. It is not ours to possess and manipulate and manage!
And the straying church has been so busy trying to pass laws that make the nation a theocracy that it's neglected the poor and the needy and all of the empathy and outreach and compassion to which it's called. Righteousness without compassion is failure, and the institution of Christianity in America gets a big, fat "F". For the very first time in my life, I saw a church do an act of charity to help someone in need. I happened to be the person in need. And I was provided for without judgement. How many churches would do this? Maybe most, but how many would do it without foisting a sense of shame on the recipient? Without clucking their tongues at what apparent irresponsibility has led the beneficiary to this deplorable place of financial failure? Not many. Not many at all. The glaring example of functional faith in my life just served to destroy the last illusions I had about the health of the American church.
The deception and misdirection runs deep. How easy is it for devoted, practicing Christians to spout theories demanding that beneficiaries of social programs prove their worth and their value to society before receiving or continuing to receive help? This isn't in the Bible. This kind of performance orientation is a deceit that steers us away from the propitiation of Christ. We're not acceptable to God because of how successful we are, nor is it evidence of our failure and sin if we find ourselves destitute. "Who sinned, rabbi, this man or his father?" No one, silly disciple. The world is broken and it is cruel to its inhabitants.
I wish I could mandate that people get some real life diversity experience before they're allowed to participate in national domestic policy debates, but I know that this flies in the face of the principles on which the government is built. It's exclusivity. But goodness gracious, the kind of exclusivity that says "You don't get a damned thing unless you work for it to my standards" doesn't do us any good either, and Christians have really been duped into buying this kind of philosophy. We, as Christians, have sacrificed and marginalized both our own dynamism and maturity as well as our message and beliefs out of a subtle misdirection toward self-preservation. We fail our lost friends and neighbors as we simultaneously fail to trust God as He intends us to trust Him.
I've digressed a bit. The broader point is that those who argue that it isn't the government's job to preserve people in times of difficulty are currently hard pressed to point out somebody else that's actually interested in doing the job. Private industry won't regulate itself. It hasn't the ethics to do so. Charities are falling flat, partially because of internal politics and tribalism, partly because those most inclined to donate to charities are clutching their Jeffersons and Benjamins as tightly as ever.
Something needs to give now, and the status quo has long ceased to be an effective answer. We're the richest nation in the world, maybe we got that way by capitalism, but we also got to this point through a carefully nurtured sense of Manifest Destiny, and that's not exactly a charitable, decent, upright heritage. The United States is not God's gift to nation-states any more than Britain was or Rome long before. His purposes are far subtler and far more eternal than the wealth of nations. It's high time we adjust our mentality. People are suffering and dying to preserve our twisted sense that unfettered individualism is healthy for a society.
And what's so wrong with Socialism anyway? I won't be easily dissuaded from believing that most anti-socialists think that Socialism is evil is because, to them, it correlates 1:1 with Stalinist Communism...and then we're right back to my assertion that, collectively, we're too dumb to think this through.
That's hyperbole, and I know it, but I've heard people my age say, "I don't want to be forced to pay premiums on insurance. I'm healthy. If something happens, I'll work it out and pay off the hospital on an individual basis." Naive. Naive. Naive. If these people continue to have their way, nothing changes, and we keep the bloat we have. If you've never seen uncovered bills, you can't know that an appendectomy costs $14,000 to start and just goes north from there. Major car wreck injuries? Cancer? Hello bankruptcy. These people need to be mandated to protect themselves. This is not in the spirit of the American Way, but the American Way coldly allows people to run themselves into the ground. That's not justice; it's uncaring at best, and malicious neglect at worst.
I know I'm wandering about, but this kind of stream-of-consciousness thinking has a certain value.
A final thought aimed at half-Christian philosophy. I know of people that are afraid that if the government socializes everything, people will never understand that they need God, and the Christian message will fall on deaf ears. Well, intentionally keeping people in poverty and hunger to prove that they need God isn't going to help them come to know a loving, omnipotent creator, either. The only problem with Marx's Socialism (as I understand it) is that it believes that if all of the material needs of men are met, they will be satisfied, content and functional. Well, if we did meet all of the people's material needs, they'd still need God. Even as it is, with have and have-not capitalism, people still think they'll be fine if they can get money. They're poor and hungry and troubled, and they're not looking to God.
Really, this is several separate essays about politics and religion and Christian doctrine all blended into one...so I'll end without really concluding:
There are far fewer freeloaders than you think, and there is far more injustice done in the name of our precious capitalism than most in the middle class can even conceive of. And, to make it all more fun, expediency on the part of a secular political party and misguided activism on the part of a cloister of religious leaders have conspired to railroad Christianity in America into a place that pretty heinously flouts well-defined doctrine about God and country and the balance between the two.
I have been an angry conservative. Then I actually spent time in the world with my eyes open. It doesn't work. Left wing idealism falls short as well. It's a complicated world, my friends, and there is more to America than you think. Let's stop pretending that there was once a good, Christian America. It's a lie.
