Unless and until we, as a people, decide that the maintenance of our health and the treatment of disease are too important to be left to the mercy of market forces, to decisions made with an eye to the for-profit bottom-line; unless and until we are able to muster the self-respect necessary to demand the complete reorganization (and/or dismantling) of for-profit insurance corporations, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, elder care facilities, and medical practices, we will never witness the revolution in health care that we want and, frankly, that we deserve.
The Obama Administration is presently colluding with the for-profit status quo to arrange our evacuation from one sinking ship into another--because that's the American Way. You don't want Coke? No worries. Here, have a Pepsi instead. Frying pan too hot for you? Not a problem. Just jump over here--into the fire.
We, the people, subscribe to the fiction that we have delegated the responsibility for our lives and welfare to democratically elected officials but, in fact, we have delegated that responsibility to the unelected individuals and organizations those elected officials depend upon and answer to: lobbyists for special interests, career bureaucrats, the Pentagon and its corporate welfare allies in the so-called defense industry.
We like sheep have gone astray and there is no help for us--unless and until we wake up and gain insight into the true nature of our predicament. The health care debacle is merely symptomatic of a far more pernicious affliction: a disease of the will. The will of the people that makes for a functioning democracy.
The American experiment in freedom has always been an under-realized ideal; under-realized because we sold our birthright as free women and men for a mess of commodification. Though our national mythology continues to look to the pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock as the commencement of our spiritual journey as a people, it is in fact the Jamestown settlement that was and remains the authentic emblem of the state of our national soul. We live and die by mercantilism.
Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others' master, and yet is more a slave than they... J. J. Rousseau.
1 comment:
Brilliant post GKS moderator. Bill Moyers on his indispensable show last friday had 2 academic health-care economists on who basically echoed your post: a single payer system is the only humane way to reform. Its a shame that BHO, because of the forces arrayed against him, can only offer us a choice between a deeply flawed system and more of the deeply flawed same. We do indeed live and die by mercantilism.3
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