Health Care: Defining Moment for our Nation

It is entirely predictable that the Congressional break and the ensuing series of town hall meetings that have been in the news recently would provide opportunity for all the right wing fanatics to turn out in numbers to protest the fact that the country rejected their ideas, ideals and ideology in the last presidentlal election. This rejection of the fear based politics of the right wing and the accompanying meanness that is characteristic of their thinking was a wonderful and hopeful moment for the country.

But one election does not a nation define. The current debate over health care is a defining moment for our country. It would be the depth of shame and a moment of extreme sadness to allow the meanness of the right to define our national life, our national values and our way of life.

The ability or inability of the nation to pass and support comprehensive health care reform which gives every citizen access to good health care will define our nation for decaces to come. Either we are a nation with a soul that has matured to a new level of understanding of the need to pursue the common good or we are a nation whose soul has died, victim of the me-first, let them eat cake, Ayn Rand hatred of humanity’s highest values in favor of darwinian social systems.

There is a historic opportunity to rescue the nation from becoming a first class example of a rich nation that sold its birthright to a handful of mean ideologues who took over the air waves. It is time for the real silent majority – those who have some remaining sense of the moral obligation to create a society in which all have access to the basic needs of life – to stand up and be counted.

What is clear is that we cannot trust the Republicans even to dismiss or denounce the extreme element of their constituency who spread lies and hatred as part of the national debate over the most essential of all questions for a nation with extreme wealth.

There is one overriding concern in health care reform: making health care affordable for the 45 million Americans who do not have access to health insurance. If the private sector could have solved this national embarressment, it would have already. The government needs to ensure this access by offering a tax-based support for affordable health care insurance. There is no private sector effort that can solve it, first and foremost because the private sector does not care to solve it, has no interest in solving it and can see no profit in solving it.

The cost for health care for every one, versus, for instance, the cost of wars which have only endangered our national future and deepened our national debt, is minimal and the refusal to take an action to resolve the most essential issue for human well being because of this minimal cost will define the nation as one that has lost its soul for decades to come.

It is time that the nation stand up to the right wing, Republican meanness that has kept us captive and slowly killed the soul of the nation and pass comprehensive health care reform that extends real access to quality health care to all our citizens. Anything less is unacceptable for a nation whose soul rests upon the idea that we are all created equal and that democracy is the best political system to provide for the common good.