The media are focused on whether President Obama lied when he claimed that those with healthcare plans they liked would be able to keep them. He may have, and if he did I support him. The reason I condone his untruth sheds light on the central problem of the American system, people and culture: Americans are unable or unwilling to have honest, general and logical debates in the public sphere, and are not interested anymore in the rights and fortunes of other people, so if a politician wants to pass a progressive policy, he/she needs to lie and proclaim that the policy will not affect those who are not in favor of it. We live in the richest country in world history. Most of that wealth is inherited, money earning money. Yet we have millions of Americans who could not buy healthcare before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Do we call the New Deal Franklins Deal? How is it not disrespectful to call the new law Obamacare?) because wealthy insurance companies operated on a policy of exclusion, not inclusion. The people of this country were stuck with a healthcare system hijacked by third-party bureaucrats (there are private business bureaucracies too) and set up with one goal, which was profit. Profiting on peoples health. Let me be clear. People who do not deliver the healthcare profiting from peoples health, not doctors and nurses. And these bureaucrats pushed a substandard product, measurably less valuable to consumers than the healthcare policies in almost all other modern socialist democracies (America is a socialist democracy). So Obama learned that a lot of bankruptcies were caused by unpaid medical bills due to insurance that was not consumer-friendly. He made the decision to modernize the healthcare industry by setting minimum standards, installing consumer protections, and opening up the market for almost everyone; he tried to make it more fair. But fair is a dirty word in America, a socialist-secret Muslim-foreigner-atheist-Kenyan word. So he sold it in market terms like individual mandate, employer responsibility, rated plans, and so on. And he had to do this because Americans generally do not understand the history of modern issues, as if all modern political issues were born yesterday. Insurance was a great idea. At some point, civilized people realized that anyones house can burn down, and that anyone can get sick, and that anyones car can get hit. So communities pooled resources together so that a shared risk would not necessarily bankrupt individuals who were unluckyenough (another dirty word, luck has nothing to do with life) to hit the destruction jackpot. The idea behind this was fairness, and community, not profit. But it became profit, and guess what? It started to benefit people selling it much more than people buying it, to a criminal degree. Obama faced the enormous challenge of realigning health insurance with fairness in a capitalist, pro-business framework, in a country where the general interpretation of freedom by half of the population is that one should have the right to sleep in a dumpster and refuse to hire gay employees. So he either lied outright (every president does) or spoke with certainty about what he did not really know when he sold this law. And it was exactly the right untrue generalization to push, because it speaks to the central question of the law which no one in the media is addressing on primetime. The central debate of Obamacare is not one of socialism vs. capitalism (its both), or of constitutionality vs. tyranny (its legal), or of paternalism vs. freedom (government has as much interest in mandating minimum healthcare standards as it does mandating seatbelt usage), but of our obligations to ourselves, our country, and other people. Ask yourself this question: Would you be willing to pay $50 or $100 more per month so that 30 million people could obtain the right to see a doctor when they get sick? In a perfect world, President Obama would have sold the law like this: In order so that millions of Americans once excluded can be included in our healthcare system, and in an effort to bring overall healthcare costs down to sustainable levels, this law will require that almost everyone will have to buy health insurance. In exchange for a vastly expanded consumer market, insurance companies will have to abolish lifetime maximum benefits, pre-existing conditions restrictions, drops in coverage for the unemployed, and will have to meet minimum standards in order to sell their plans. This law will set up exchange websites where consumers will shop for insurance and have the opportunity to compare plans. This mechanism should decrease overall costs, although it may increase costs for some at first if consumers opt to pay the fines levied for non-compliance. Even if some individual costs may go up, its time for Americans to stand together and share the security which right now is sadly deficient from a large proportion of American citizens, in this land of freedom and opportunity for all. George Carlin once said that if honesty were ever introduced into American life, the entire system would collapse. And we see this in the media. Inane stories about individual people who were dropped from substandard plans are shown now (they can buy better ones), but no stories about people dying because they are not allowed to buy insurance are being shown. There are endless split-screen debates on cable news, involving yelling, interrupting and ignorance, by experts. Where are the real people? The people more like everyone else? They should be the debaters on cable news, not corporate lobbyists. Can anyone imagine my hypothetical selling point working in our culture of greed and entitlement? Americans are great at saying certain things; we support the troops, value education, support equal rights and so on. But most Americans will never consider paying $1 more to feed a homeless veteran, to improve school standards or to fight for equality, if it comes through government. Private charity should have the job of safeguarding the fortune of our downtrodden citizens, they say. A problem: The vast majority of people do not give money, and so government must step in. Obama knew that people would not be willing to sacrifice anything to expand the healthcare market, so he practiced politics to push through a law that will help millions of people improve their quality of life. If the cost is that certain people who can afford to pay more for health insurance do so, is that not charity? Is making sacrifices to show compassion to the sick a horrible thing? Is this not something Jesus would be in favor of?
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 04:01:00 +0000
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