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On June 14, 2009 on Face the Nation the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky) said to the host, Bob Schieffer, that most Republicans would oppose any plan that included government-backed health insurance. (More details about his interview can be found on a Face the Nation blog posting.)
This seems to be another case where the Republican Party stands in opposition to the spiritual foundations that guide most people in the United States. According to Rabbi Akiba, the most important teaching in the Torah is the injunction in Leviticus 19:18 to love one's neighbor as oneself. Jesus took this teaching to heart, and it became a summary of the most important teaching in Christianity. Similar teachings can be found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Confucianism. It is also found in the traditions of many North American native peoples. It would be hard to deny that in the United States, a country in which religious faith and practice is central to the lives of the majority of citizens, that tending to the needs of the sick, the poor, the weak and the downtrodden is at the very core of what most Americans profess. Why is it not at the core of the values professed by Republicans?
I can only offer an amateurish response to my own question. For as long as I can remember (which is a span of time going back to the late 1940s), Republicans have been identified as the party most concerned with fighting what they perceive as enemies of American values. In the 1950s, the principal focus of Republican concern was communism. Communism was routinely depicted as anti-Christian and atheistic. It was an easy, albeit fallacious, step from that premise to the conclusion that anything communists favor must be in some way contrary to the basis teachings of Christianity. On the principle that any friend of my enemy is my enemy, and any enemy of my enemy is my friend, anti-Communists (both Democrats and Republicans) came to see labor unions as a threat not only to the American way of life but to the core values of Christianity. Not only organizations that sought to improve the working conditions of paid workers, but organizations that sought any kind of economic justice, or any other kind of justice, came to be regarded with suspicion. People working for the abolition of racial segregation, or for international peace, or for nuclear disarmament all came to be seen as enemies of the state. People seeking racial equality or gender equality could be (and were) dismissed as Communist sympathizers seeking to undermine the core foundations of the American way of life. Those who sought to maintain the systematic injustices against which labor unions and other social activists fought, on the other hand, were depicted as the pillars of American democracy. Those who opposed racial equality and gender equality and most other forms of social justice were those who had something to lose if justice were to prevail. Those who had something to lose were the wealthy and the powerful, not only individuals who were wealthy and powerful but corporations. What they had to lose was their material wealth. And so it came to be that many Americans, in the name of standing against godless Communism, came to stand for the very forces that were least interested in fighting for the sick, the poor, the weak and the downtrodden. In the name of defending Christianity, many (perhaps even the majority) of Americans ended up supporting the principal forces working against the realization of Christian social values.
The same skewed logic that drove the anti-Communist fervor of the McCarthy era and the Cold War era continues to drive the policies favored by Senator McConnell. Rather than working tirelessly for programs that would bring affordable and efficient health-care to the millions of people who now cannot afford the artificially high prices of medical care in the United States, McConnell and his fellow Republicans work tirelessly not for the sick and the weak individuals who require compassionate care but for the powerful insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that have made a lucrative commercial enterprise of health care and that have, in so doing, driven medical and pharmaceutical costs higher in the United States than in any industrialized nation. Americans pay far more for significantly inferior health care than do Canadians, Europeans, Japanese and Israelis. Many Americans get no health care at all, not even of the inferior kind available in the USA, because they simply cannot afford it. Many Americans who do get the health care they need face financial ruin as a result of getting the care they need. This is hardly what one would expect of a nation run according to Christian (or Buddhist or Confucian or Hindu or Islamic or Jewish) religious principles. It is what one would expect of a nation run according to callous materialistic values pursued in utter contempt of spiritual values of any kind. It would be difficult to find a more godless nation on this planet than the United States of America as it has evolved under the influence of powerful politicians claiming to operating on Christian family values.
Turning anti-spiritual nations around has traditionally been the work of prophets. Prophets are rarely loved by the generations that they seek to heal. As recently as 2004, the American Friends Service Committee, which has worked for prison reform and more justice in immigration policy and more humane policies in governmental relations with native Americans, was declared a “criminally extremist organization” by the Denver police department. Other organizations founded by Quakers and other religious communities—organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Friends Committee on National Legislation—are under constant surveillance by the FBI and Homeland Security. Acting in accordance with the Christian principle of loving one's neighbor as oneself, and actually trying to do something to lessen one's neighbor's suffering, is regarded as criminal conduct by many of the politicians who claim most loudly to be defending the Christian heritage of this country.
It is time to call their bluff. It is time to make them ashamed of their hypocrisy. We live in a time that has been brought to ruin by those in pursuit of profits. We live in a time that can be brought back to harmony by listening to prophets.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 06/20/2009
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Congressional Democrats and a barnstorming President face deep skepticism from the American public about the details of their effort to change the nation's health-care system, even as enthusiasm for the prospect of reform remains high, according to a new TIME poll.
This story goes on to say that 56% of Americans polled are convinced that health care reform will “offer less freedom to choose doctors and coverage.” That more than half of Americans polled believe such a thing is a testimony to how effective it can be for pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies to spend millions of dollars to encourage people to worry about what might happen if the status quo changes. During the past week I have heard advertisements on radio and television, and I have received telephone calls, all urging the view that if government becomes involved in making decisions about what health insurance will cover, then people will have fewer options to get the health care they need. A favorite mantra concocted to nourish hand-wringing worry is “health care will be rationed.”
Companies whose principal aim is to make profits have done an excellent job of making Americans believe that companies whose principal aim is to make profits for their shareholders are going to be more objective in making wise decisions about what health care should be available than government bureaucrats. The track record of these for-profit companies is that we in the United States have the system we now have. That system guarantees that
During the past two weeks there has been an excellent summer course taught at University of New Mexico called Traditional medicine without borders: Curanderismo in the Southwest and Mexico. (For more information see the course's home page.) One theme that has emerged as the various Mexican and Native American healers have spoken of their practices is that a true healer never has a customer. Customers pay. If they don't pay, they do not get services. Traditional healers treat anyone who requires treatment. If the person treated is able to make a voluntary donation, then a donation is made. But patients are never turned away simply because they are not able to make a donation, or do not wish to make a donation.
A second theme that emerges is that all healing is done in a spirit of love. People who are suffering from physical and emotional stress tend not to heal as well or as quickly as people who are more tranquil and at peace. The American for-profit health-care system is not based on a spirit of love, nor is it a system that makes people calm and at ease. It is, therefore, not a system that does a very good job of curing people of illness. It is the antithesis of a healing system.
Why Americans settle for one of the worst and most expensive health-care systems in the industrialized world would be a mystery if it were not for the fact that people motivated by a craving for money are very good at manipulating beliefs. The American medical establishment has carefully manipulated bother the beliefs and the emotions of the American people. They will continue to do so until Americans stand up and say “Enough!” It's an easy word to pronounce. Let's just say it.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 07/29/2009
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There has been a lot of blogging recently about an editorial in Investors Business Daily. A summary of some of the best-known blogs can be found on the BBC website. In addition to what one finds there, a reflective piece occurs as part of a recent post on Bodhipaksa's blog site, Bodhi Tree Swaying
The BBC site notes that a theme in the debates among bloggers is whether the author of the Investors Business Daily was deliberately lying about the British national health care system or simply misinformed. As I have heard some of the questions coming from the audience at town-hall meetings on the proposed health care reforms in the United States, I have been astonished at the level of ignorance being manifested in the questions. As I have written before, it is astonishing to me to hear comments about “the” Canadian health care system. (As I pointed out in that blog posting, Canada does not have a health-care system; each province has one, and the details are different from one province to another.) I have heard almost everything from Americans but accuracy in descriptions of Canadian health care; even Americans who are relatively well-informed about the world in general seem to know very little about their neighbors to the north. In this post I plan to draw attention to a few features of the systems that I personally experienced while living in Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec, Canada and to say why I would love to see similar features in the United States.
The Canadian health-care systems provided by the provinces I have lived in are far superior to anything I have experienced in the United States. (Having said that, I have heard enough about the Kaiser plan in California to think it would make an excellent model for health-care in the United States.) What has amazed me most about the debates in the United States is that from the very start the most sensible plan of all—a single-payer system—has been “off the table.” None of the various proposals being considered in the United States would make the US health-care system even close to either the British or the Canadian systems or anything that is available in Europe or Japan. Almost as astonishing to me has been the sheer ignorance that prevails in the United States about why health care is so substandard in the United States. In place of accurate information and careful argumentation, one finds in this debate very little but misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. If Americans do not wake up and take an interest in matters that are to their own advantage, they will end up with the inferior kind of health care that willfully ignorant people probably deserve.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 08/14/2009
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Last night I saw a news segment about one of the town-hall meetings around the United States in which citizens are voicing their concerns about health-care reform. One woman, her voice trembling with emotion, asked “Can you name one thing—one thing—that government has become involved in that has not grown wildly out of control and hopelessly inefficient?” I gather that her rhetorical question was mean to be an argument against government being involved in the health-care industry.
Within a couple of seconds of hearing the question, I was thinking of all the government agencies that have done excellent jobs of overseeing and performing tasks that private enterprise would have done much less efficiently and that have not grown wildly out of control. The first few that came to mind were government agencies that I know about because members of my family have worked for them: The United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services. Then I thought of government agencies that have provided funds to scholarly, scientific and artistic endeavors that would not likely be funded by private enterprise: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation.
Within less than a minute I was able to think of about a dozen or so more national government agencies that routinely do excellent jobs without growing wildly out of control. And of course when I began to think of governmental agencies at the state, county and municipal level the number of exemplary government agencies began to fill me with a deep sense of gratitude for all the things that governments provide the citizens of the United States. So where, I began to wonder, does this fear of so-called “big government” come from?
When I begin to think of government ventures that really have grown wildly out of control and have swollen budgets for iefficiently doing services that we hardly need done at all, I also notice that it is these government enterprises that we hear about most often and that we encounter more often than we would like. The most wasteful big-government operation of all, of course, is the military, which gobbles up 43% of all monies gained through taxes. When people look back on American military ventures that have taken place since the end of the second world war, the only thing they can see are counterproductive operations that have wasted lives, destroyed property and depleted the treasury. If the military is the most visible arm of the American government, no wonder Americans are so distrustful of government.
Another branch of government that everyone who travels by air experiences is the Transportation Secuirty Administration, which makes sure that no grandmother boards an airplane with more than three ounces of skin lotion and that no child has a bomb concealed in his shoe. At enormous expense and irritation to the traveling public, this highly visible organization asks us to believe it is their work that has prevented further hijackings and bombings of aircraft. When Americans see how many obviously pointless measures are taken by government agencies in the name of airport security, no wonder they are wary of more big government.
Is there any reason to believe that a government-regulated medical insurance program or a government-regulated pharmaceutical industry would be as inefficient and wasteful as the military or the Department of Homeland Security, or as invasive as the FBI? No. It has not proven to be so in other industrialized nations. Why assume that a national health service would be more like the US military than like the US Park Service or the Department of Housing an Urban Development?
Is there any reason to believe that a government-regulated medical insurance program or a government-regulated pharmaceutical industry would be as inefficient and wasteful as for-profit health insurance companies and for-profit health maintenance organizations (HMO)? Again, the answer is suggested by the experience of people living in countries that have government-managed health-care systems. They provide much better care and a fraction of the cost of what is available in the United States in our market-driven system.
The American fear of big government is not entirely irrational. There are very expensive government agencies that return very little of value to society; the military is the most obvious of these. But it is irrational to fear all government. There are also scores of governmental agencies that none of us would want to live without: the National Guard, various police forces, fire-fighting agencies, departments that build and maintain roads and highways and bridges and airports. Who would prefer having to travel on privately own turnpikes and tollways instead of on the federally maintained system of interstate highways and all the state highways? Who would prefer to live in a society in which every merchant had his own definition of what a pound of weight or a yard of length or a minute of time is, as opposed to a society with a federally financed Bureau of Standards? Who would like to live in a country without a national postal service?
Who would like to live in a country that has a health system in which the people most in need of care cannot afford to pay for it, and in which insurance agencies have no incentive at all to provide coverage to anyone who might make claims that could reduce the dividends or shareholders or diminish the bonuses paid to already highly paid executives? I guess that question has an answer. Sarah Palin seems to be one such person. But why? And why are so many Americans so ready to be persuaded by her careless rhetoric than by a careful study of what would actually be of benefit to them?
Care to study the situation a little more carefully? One place to begin is at the CNN site on health care.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 08/16/2009
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