#205 - A Nation Divided, Part 1

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." - Abraham Lincoln

First, a disclaimer. I pay little attention to the news these days, not because of the "distortion" and "fabrication" of stories in the "liberal media" (sorry, but when a small group of corporations controls nearly all mass media outlets, there is nothing "liberal" about it), but because, after spending more than a decade in broadcast journalism, I no longer need or desire the aggravation, stress, or depressing thoughts that come from watching or reading the news on a regular basis.

I do occasionally scan the headlines, and I read with utter amazement some of the things a handful of my Facebook friends post. As a result, I have come to the conclusion (suggested once before on this blog) that this nation, in its present form, is not long for this world.

We've reduced positions and arguments to their lowest common denominator (perhaps we always have). Serious discussion followed by consensus or compromise no longer exists, and we reduce issues and views to a black and white battle between two opposing sides when, in fact, there are likely a multitude of views and positions between those two polar extremes. Each extreme pushes back against the middle, further polarizing the other and driving the margins further apart.

I was told once by a former friend that as I got older I would become more conservative. That has not happened. Because of what I described in the previous paragraph, I have, if anything, become more progressive or liberal in my views.

For instance, I support Bernie Sanders' call to make college tuition free. Not because I want a lot of "free stuff" (as critics deride this stand) or believe I am "entitled" (another argument used against young people and certain classes of society, neither of which applies to me), but because I believe it is an investment in the future of this nation.

We need more scientists and engineers and doctors and philosophers, and the best way to get them is to make college affordable and available to those who are academically and intellectually able to attend without requiring those students to all but mortgage their futures in order to do so. I believe this country's decision to deregulate student loans (thereby allowing banks to charge higher interest rates and make the ultimate cost of college that much more expensive) was a huge mistake.

I believe affordable access to health care is a basic human right. By this, I don't simply mean access to hospital emergency rooms. I mean maintenance and preventative health care. One way to make and keep health care affordable it to make sure symptoms are treated before they become serious problems and require a hospital visit. A healthy people is a productive people, and I don't believe funneling the sick and the poor into and through overworked and overcrowded hospital emergency rooms is the best solution or the best use of health care resources.

I also believe that everyone working deserves to be paid a living wage. Conservatives will argue that some people work harder and deserve more or that those who want to succeed can. I don't disagree with the first part of that argument but believe the second part becomes less true every day (if it ever was true).

Not everyone can be a millionaire/billionaire and not everyone can own his/her own business. We will always need people to collect our garbage, to serve us in stores and restaurants, to clean in our businesses. Have we decided that these people are less worthwhile, less deserving because of what they do?

We complain about illegal immigration while making certain jobs so low-paying that only illegal immigrants can afford to take them. We believe certain jobs are not worth more than minimum wage and then complain about the service we receive from those workers. We complain about the quality of our education system while at the same time we pull our children out of public schools and put them into private or charter schools.

The very first phrase of the U.S. Constitution reads "We the people of the United States." It doesn't read "some of the people" or "only the people who are like us" or "those people who think like us." To me, "we the people" means all of us, which I believe means we have to do certain things and provide certain services for all of us, not simply those who can afford them. From where I sit, that means access to affordable and quality education and health care.

I've written all of this and realized I did not even touch on the one thing that inspired or provoked this post. I'll save that for another time.

Crimes and Misdemeanors and Other Thoughts

I have been following, off and on, the increasingly raucous debate over whether the government should be involved in health care. Interestingly, I think, the loudest opposition comes from people who have no need of a public option for health care and from those who fear that such an option will kill their goose that laid the golden egg. Perhaps it should.

Frankly, I believe insurance company decisions regarding whether to pay benefits or not are based all too often on the impact to their bottom line or to the value of shareholders' stock instead of the impact on a person's life or even survival. My own feeling is that if insurance companies must exist, they should do so to provide supplemental insurance to cover more voluntary things such as plastic surgery.

Opponents on the Right complain that any government involvement in health care takes us another step down the road to socialism. I'm all for private enterprise - in areas that do not hold the potential of a life or death decision: buying a car, dining out, clothing stores, and the like. However, I also believe there are places where the for-profit economic model has no place, and health care is one of them.

Some have suggested that reform, such as a law to prevent denial of benefits for a preexisting condition is a better approach. At one time, I might have agreed. But no more. I no longer believe a piecemeal approach can work. Nor do I think the health insurance industry will sit still for such changes to their cash cow. If they can kill such a massive reform effort as the one currently underway, individual changes stand no chance of success.

I think it is a travesty, even a crime that the richest nation in the world ranks 33rd in the world in infant mortality rate, according to a 2006 United Nations report. (A 2007 report from the CDC puts that death rate even higher.) By the way, that is five spots worse than lowly and impoverished Cuba. (The U.S. ranks 34th in the rate of child deaths within the first five years of life. Cuba ranks 26th in that regard.) The 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook rank the United States even lower at 46th in the world. That bastion of wealth, Slovenia, ranks 19th, with two fewer infant deaths per 1,000 live births than the U.S.

Simply put, capitalism has no place in health care. Maybe, though, this debate can serve as a catalyst to review and rethink capitalism, not with the goal of replacing it but with the goal of restoring some balance. For instance, in 1970, a company CEO made, on average 25 times the salary on one of his workers. In 2009, that figure was by some estimates 700 times the average worker's income. Even as jobs are lost or shipped overseas, CEO salaries continue to rise. Perhaps this is what Reagan meant when he talked about trickle-down economics. The top tier skims off the cream and allows whatever is left to trickle down to the rest of us.

I work for a company that a few years back had a CEO who nearly ran the company into the ground. He managed to unload the company, saddling the new buyers with billions of dollars in debt in the process, then drove off into the sunset with his $150 million golden parachute. In the meantime, several hundred of the rank and file workers he left behind had their jobs eliminated or shipped overseas.

I don't think the original proponents of capitalism ever had this in mind. This is no longer your father's capitalism, where small businesses served as the backbone of the economy. That model has been replaced by an oligarchy in which CEOs hold most of the wealth and the power that comes with it.

Is this really what the Founding Fathers had in mind?

A Declaration for 21st Century America

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

- From the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

Judging from some of the ongoing political discussion, these truths are not self-evident. All men (and women) are only created equal if the size of their bank account measures up. I don't begrudge a person getting rich, but how much is enough?

For one of the two political parties, it seems there is never enough. Nor does it seem that this party agrees with the Declaration of Independence's assertion regarding those pesky "unalienable rights." You know, those rights that are not to be taken away.

Each year, the gap between rich and poor widens and not only in terms of income. As the income gap grows, so, too, does the number of Americans with no health insurance: 47-million at last count. Yet only one political party seems ready to try something other than what the country is doing now.

The Democrats have proposed Universal Health Care while the Republicans say the marketplace should provide the solution. It hasn't done so yet; why think it will now? Private solutions, the G.O.P. insists. Those 47-million uninsured Americans are suddenly supposed to find the money they did not have before in order to pay for insurance?

Surely not even the Republicans believe all 47-million of these people are lazy deadbeats who could afford insurance if they would simply go out and get a job. Perhaps they would do well to remember those "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and to think about what they might actually mean.

The unalienable right to life as stated in the Declaration does not merely mean the right to keep breathing. In the context of the Declaration, it means something closer to the right to a decent quality of life. It seems to me that part of that quality of life should and must include health care.

Now to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Is a person truly free or free to pursue happiness if the threat of catastrophic illness and exorbitant health care costs is hanging over their head?

Yet the Republicans argue that Universal Health Care, in the hands of the government is a wasteful and inefficient idea. Inefficient? Perhaps. But it seems to me that health is too important and too basic to be a for-profit concern.So, pardon me if I prefer inefficient yet fair to efficient and exclusionary, based on income and/or health.

Perhaps the answer is something in-between private enterprise and government-sponsored health care. I do believe the government needs to step up and step in to provide health insurance for those people who could not otherwise afford it: small business employees, the self-employed, low-income workers, and so forth. Higher-paid employees and other professionals, as well as upper-income Americans, would be free to pursue other insurance options.

Only by ensuring that all Americans have equal access to affordable health care can we ensure that America lives up to the preamble of its founding document and truly gives each and everyone of us the unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."