Page 1 of 2 US healthcare debate sick to the heart
By Julian Delasantellis
Whether the late John Hughes will go down as one of the greatest directors of
all times in terms of artistic proficiency will be a matter of debate among
movie critics; what won't be in question was his ability to spin the box office
numbers to amazingly elevated heights. Most prominent among them was 1990's Home
Alone, at the time the third highest, and number one comedy, grossing
film of all time.
The story begins as an extended American family is marshalling in Chicago for a
trip to Paris. The adults, Peter, (John Heard) and Kate (Catherine O'Hara) run
through a checklist to make sure they have made all the preparations for the
trip, dealing with the house's utilities, their luggage, and, especially, all
their nieces, nephews and their own children. To their horror, at the airport
they realize that they have forgotten just one thing, their youngest
child, 8-year-old Kevin (Macauley Caulkin).
The US Congress is scheduled to be on vacation until September 8, but,
sometimes it seems like, in all their preparations, they've forgotten something
important, just like in Home Alone.
"Did we get the bribes from
the insurance industry?"
"Check."
"From the pharmaceutical industry?"
"Got it."
"The doctor's lobby? Where's their big check?"
"Right here."
"How about the hospitals? Have they come through?"
"Big time."
"So what have we forgotten? I keep thinking we have forgotten something?"
Well, could it be any type of input or real consultation with the people? Has
it been that long since Congress abased itself with the quaint custom of rule
by popular consent that it totally slipped their mind? If so, is what we are
seeing in the raucous mouths now showing up at congressional "town meetings"
only a natural outgrowth of the American people being too long "home alone?"
At this time last year, the political news from America was all bright and gay,
full of the boundless optimism being engendered by then presidential candidate
Barack Obama's awesome ability to rally, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the
"better angels of our nature" in order to repair the wounds and rents inflicted
through eight years of the awesome incompetence of George W Bush's reign.
Now, a man shows up at a town meeting with Obama carrying a loaded
semi-automatic pistol in a fully on display holster, carrying a sign with all
but the last seven words of Thomas Jefferson's 1787 dictum that "The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants." What indicates just how much things have changed from last year is
not the fact that this man, William Kostric, chose to exercise his gun-carrying
rights in this fashion. It's that so many, perhaps up to a third of Americans
or more, can't see what all the fuss is about that he did.
For just about every night now this month, the world's media have been
saturated with tape of absolutely furious, foaming at the mouth, enraged and
frequently just as incoherent Americans confronting their senators and
congressmen at so-called "town meetings" designed to evoke the supposed pure
democracy of rural governance.
The standard press explanation of this phenomenon is anger and fear over
President Obama's efforts to reform the American healthcare delivery and
finance system sufficient to provide healthcare services to the 46 million
Americans with no health insurance.
I initially accepted this mainstream media explanation, and that puzzled me;
many of those protesting against the effort to extend health insurance were
clearly from a social and economic class where access to health insurance was
far from a guaranteed fact of life. Illustrative of this was the case of one
Malcolm Gladney of St Louis, injured in a town hall melee with alleged union
officials who disagreed with his contention that the government should not
provide healthcare insurance to those that needed it. Gladney was forced to
solicit donations to cover his medical bills, since he, of course, had no
health insurance.
But now I think that the conventional wisdom is wrong. There's a lot more going
on here than simple protest over the healthcare bill. I learned that after
attending a town hall meeting with a local congressman here in Washington
State.
It was Congressman Rick Larsen, of Washington's Second Congressional District,
in the suburban and semi-rural hinterlands north of Seattle, who organized the
event, held in a local minor league baseball park.
You may have an image of Seattle, where Obama beat John McCain with over 80% of
the vote, as irretrievably left wing and new age. You're probably pretty much
on the mark there. After all, what other American city has a 5-meter tall
statue of Lenin on public land?
It's not like that in Seattle's outer exurbia. Obama carried Larsen's district
by "only" 14 percentage points, as opposed to the 17 points by which he carried
the state. Obama won the nation by 7 percentage points). That, and the fairly
standard programming package of Fox News and about five conservative talk-show
hosts for every one liberal voice on local radio meant that, as far someone who
supports universal coverage goes, I was fully expecting to frequently hear many
very discouraging words.
In that, my expectations were perfectly met.
Standing down at home plate in front of a crowd estimated by local media to be
around 2,500, Larsen opened the meeting by having a local girl sing the
national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.
I've been to many public meetings in the United States, and I've never before
this seen one commence with the national anthem - the Pledge of Allegiance is
far more common. Maybe this is standard for a Larsen meeting, maybe not. If
not, and considering how many of his colleagues at other town meetings across
the country have had the capital punishment epithet (in American politics,
anyway) of "communist!" screamed at them, I looked at this as a form of a
patriotic booster shot, an inoculation boosting Larsen's immunity against this
lethal kind of threat to an American solon's incumbency.
Larsen asked for questions. The first one was about as surprising as the next
day's sunrise - whether illegal aliens will receive the supposedly "free" (in
reality, it's anything but) healthcare under the new arrangements.
There it is, American politics and society's madwoman in the attic, escaping
from her confinement to terrorize the polite society sipping brandies in the
drawing room.
Perhaps no other issue defines the divide between America's governing elite and
those being governed than the issue of illegal, mostly Hispanic, immigration
into the country. Rank and file Democrats and Republicans alike oppose it, and
oppose it vehemently. For the party political elites, it's another story.
The Democrats support it because, at least as of yet, the families of the
immigrants are reliably Democratic voters. The Republicans have among their
rank and file whole legions of ugly nativists, but the party's bills are paid
by corporate elites who have greatly enjoyed the role new immigrants have
played in expanding the labor pool and thus breaking the back of organized
labor.
It was always former George W Bush White House political advisor Karl Rove's
dream to draw upon the innate social conservatism of the new immigrants to lure
them into the Republican party, but the streams of anti-immigrant vitriol and
furor directed towards Hispanic immigrants on right-wing talk radio, where the
Republican party organizes and disciplines its base, drove Hispanics firmly to
the Democrats.
It is believed that it was the huge Hispanic bloc voting Democratic in the
states of Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado (and possibly Florida) that drove
those states to Obama last year. For the 2012 election, Democrats have high
hopes that the fast-growing Hispanic vote will help them hold these states and
more, possibly Arizona, maybe even Texas.
Therefore, an implicit deal seems to have been struck among the party elites.
The Republicans won't talk about immigration because every time they do their
polemicists take the issue so far as to sound like something from Julius
Streicher's Der Sturmer. In supposedly liberal Boston, a radio talk-show
host was briefly taken off the air for calling Mexicans "criminaliens,"
"primitives," "leeches," and exporters of "women with mustaches and VD".
Democrats mostly support illegal immigration and immigrants, but they don't
trumpet it, not wanting to needlessly alienate their own blue-collar base.
This gentleman's agreement between the party elites on immigration means that
no legislation is upcoming in the Congress on the issue, leaving the general
populace's anger to bubble and boil ever higher, only partially relieved when
the elite deign to actually visit the people - at events such as healthcare
town meetings.
Larsen handled the question, and another like it, with ease; he was obviously
prepared for this. The flubs and flailings displayed recently by others of his
ilk in these settings were nowhere to be seen. Clearly, the congressman had no
intention of showing up on the national news in front of a screaming crowd with
the now-familiar deer-in-the-headlights look.
Larsen took other questions. If some in the crowd didn't like his answers, they
would scream afterwards, and sometimes inter allia yell out "liar!" or "you
lie!"
A man arose. His healthcare question was to ask Larsen, to great applause,
whether he agreed with Texas Republican/libertarian congressman Ron Paul's call
to audit the US Federal Reserve Bank.
Once a windmill that only political extremist/cult leader Lyndon LaRouche's
subway station knights tilted at, this concept, the Fed audit, is getting more
and more buzz these days. People see the economic crisis, read headlines that
indicate that the Fed is doing things, things that they don't understand, and
in reaction automatically assume that the two have some undoubtedly diabolical
connection.
Once, I heard a man call into a talk show, list the litany of current American
social problems, from poverty to unemployment to homelessness, and then come to
the conclusion that they were all caused by what he said was the Federal
Reserve's well-known practice of every night transferring its cash balances to
the Bank of Israel.
Larsen noted that the Federal Reserve currently is audited, by the non-partisan
US Government Accounting Office (GAO). This satisfied neither the questioner
nor the crowd; obviously, the GAO's reports are wrong because they haven't
found the conspiracy yet. In much the same way as Fox Mulder do on the X-Files,
the crowd believes that the truth is still out there.
One man's question perfectly illustrates the beating the Republican right and
its paymasters in the medical-industrial complex have administered to Obama and
the left in this debate.
"Congressman Larsen, now that the government is taking over Medicare ... " (the
government-run program for Americans 65 years and older)
Titters of laughter reverberate through the crowd, and Larsen stopped the
questioner before he finished.
Saying the government is only now to take control over Medicare is like saying
that the Vatican is only now taking over the Roman Catholic Church, or that the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, is only now taking over
the space program. Since its inception in 1965, Medicare has every day been run
as nothing but an even more socialized single-payer version of Britain's
National Health Service. The difference between Medicare and the NHS is that
Medicare is never short of money - its budget is guaranteed.
Amazingly, millions of Americans see their parents and grandparents regularly
receiving complete medical care, from simple doctor's office visits to complex
and hugely expensive organ transplants, never receiving any bill for such, and
yet they still believe that the US government had no role in this process.
This is hugely frustrating for Obama and his rapidly diminishing ranks of
allies; how can people see a government medical system work so well for their
parents and oppose it so much for themselves?
The answer is a complex little nugget of sociological self-delusion that the
Republicans have mastered but which continually leaves the Democrats flummoxed.
Thirty-five years of derision of government that commenced with the New York
City financial crisis of 1975 have produced a new, commonly accepted definition
of what are, and who benefits from, "government programs".
Now, these are said to be universally created and maintained to serve socially
undesirable, frequently minority, unemployed layabouts who would rather sit
around and collect government "handouts" rather than do real work. After that,
according to former president Ronald Reagan in a 1976 speech, these predators
of the urban underclass get in their new Cadillacs to get free food at the
grocery store by flashing government "food stamps".
Since this cannot be a description of America's beloved elderly, who vote in
very high numbers and so thus have politicians
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