Civilization grows over time. From primitive “might makes right” domination of the strongest, death or banishment to the weakest, to ever-evolving social concerns, systems of laws and responsibilities, humanity simply changes. Urbanization accelerates the need for reasonable controls on intense and concentrated human interaction with smaller spaces. Trade and specialization of labor adds economic pressures for symbolic currencies and regulations to create predictability in basic value-based interactivity. As technology creeps along, and then explodes, new layers of laws and privileges must be added, and as mankind begins to sap natural resources and environmental blessing, regulation by individual action no longer works.
The problem with this accelerating of change is that at each level, there are winners and losers. Traditions and values often grow for decades, even centuries, in one set of global realities and slowly find irrelevance as the world of technology, commerce, depletion of natural resources, increases in population and population concentration… as new generations discover new and differing values that help them cope in a “modern” world. This all seems obvious to anyone who can picture a Porsche driving past a caveman and his family sitting outside their earthen home.
In such transitions, there are many who cling to the past, adhere to values that might have once defined an agrarian society, perhaps ethnically homogeneous, as compared to an ethnically diverse, primarily urbanized society where “looking after your neighbor” – living in close proximity to you – becomes more important than solitary independence that might describe a farmer’s old-world existence. This, then, is the conundrum that plagues the United States. Either folks with rural values who want to preserve traditional values that really don’t apply to the new majority of urban dwellers, and those at the top of the food chain who can use people who hold such old-world values to maintain their financial advantage.
The weapons of choice are words. Want to kill something and make it sound dirty, call it “socialism.” We had the Red Scare in the 1950s, fought a Cold War with the Soviets for decades, and watched the Eastern Bloc and Soviet communism dwindle and die based on this failed philosophy. We know that Cuban communism and Venezuelan or Bolivian socialism just don’t work. They simply ignore human propensity to expect great-than-average economic rewards for hard work and specialized skills. Since these are “socialist” systems, they are proof that anything “socialist” must, therefore, be bad. But U.S. Social Security, Medicare, and even public primary and secondary education are pure, unadulterated socialism. By not using that word to describe these features of contemporary American society, they survive and are even cherished by most.
And therein lies the problem: there are good and bad features of just about any form of government you might select. There are no uniformly “correct” political philosophies just as there are no perfect forms of government. For those believing that American democracy is the best, remember, California with 37 million people has the same number of Senators as the one million people in Montana. And with gerrymandering, we’ve managed rather openly to make one urban vote the equal of 3/5 of a rural vote.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) – Obamacare – scares the crap out of traditionalists. If there were creeping socialism, this has to be it. But when the act was passed, the focus was on supporting incumbent for-profit pharmaceutical and insurance companies, keeping most of the system in the private sector, where cost control is exceptionally difficult. We still spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare and have the most expensive medical care system on earth. It doesn’t work.
The notion of the single payer system, where everyone in the nation would be covered under a layers medical care system paid for by some form of taxation, was squeezed out of the system because the for-profits needed to continue to serve their shareholders and generate those profits. But what exactly happens in a country where average buying power has fallen continuously, without interruption, since the beginning of this new millennium, and the cost of healthcare continues to rise well above the inflation rate? What happens when fewer and fewer people, fewer and fewer companies, can afford this obvious disconnect? We simply no longer have the cash to support the profit-seeking desires of the incumbent healthcare corporate system. Change simply does not stop to accommodate those who prefer the old ways.
Canada and most of Western Europe have single payer healthcare systems, and China is working on it as well. Perhaps a little experiment in Vermont, which took advantage of one allowable part of the ACA to create just such a system, might be worth watching. “There is yet another provision in the Affordable Care Act that can open the door for states to institute their own single-payer healthcare system. Other states have a public option, especially for those below a certain income level, but no state had instituted a true single-payer system. All of this has changed thanks to President Obama and the Affordable Care Act.
“Vermont—Home of Ben and Jerry’s, Maple Syrup, Bernie Sanders and the first state to pass marriage equality. Now, Vermont will be known for something that will impact every resident in the state… The ACA provided states with federal funds to institute a Medicaid expansion. The states chose to expand the program also were able to set up their own state exchanges, which were relatively free from the problems the federal site had. Vermont decided to take it a step further by setting up their very own single payer system.
“The slogan of the program: Everybody in, nobody out… The program will be fully operational by 2017, and will be funded through Medicare, Medicaid, federal money for the ACA given to Vermont, and a slight increase [primarily in payroll] taxes. In exchange, there will be no more premiums, deductibles, copay’s, hospital bills or anything else aimed at making insurance companies a profit. Further, all hospitals and healthcare providers will now be nonprofit.” Truth-out.org, December 7th. They passed this in 2011, but it is just rolling along.
“[The plan] combines universal coverage with new cost controls in an effort to move away from a system in which the more procedures doctors and hospitals perform, the more they get paid, to one in which providers have a set budget to care for a set number of patients… The result will be health care that’s ‘a right and not a privilege,’ Gov. Peter Shumlin said…. Where some governors have backed off the politically charged topic of health care, Shumlin recently surprised many by digging more deeply into it.” Washington Times, October 26th.
Why does this remotely matter? Doesn’t survival of the fittest still apply? If you don’t earn enough to afford healthcare, shouldn’t you and your family simply be “selected out”? Life is hard, but are we really that callous? “Costs have to be held down — there is no reason why the U.S. has to pay twice the amount per capita as the next most costly system in the world (Norway’s), and still not cover millions of its citizens. A Harvard Medical School study states that 45,000 Americans die each year from treatable diseases because they cannot afford to get treatment.” Truth-Out.org. Exactly how many Americans would be an acceptable number to die from lack of healthcare or live miserable lives from lack of effective treatments?
I’m Peter Dekom, and there are just too many heartless, selfish people in this country whose push to cut, cut, cut will inevitably impair our ability to grow and prosper in the future and take back our position as the continuing-to-remain world’s number one economic superpower.
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