The Morality of Health Care Reform

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The fury and dialogue catalyzed by Joe Lieberman's unsurprising treachery on health care reform — along with futile efforts to court Olympia Snowe, and the dealmaking with Ben Nelson and other "Blue Dog" Democrats — underscores a Democratic division and a political reality progressives must take seriously. The division is one between progressives and Democrats.

The reality is that not all Democrats are progressive. The health care reform debate is illustrative of this divide, and the challenge progressives face with this political reality.

The difference depends on what you believe concerning health care. Is it an injustice that millions of Americans have little or no access to quality, affordable health care? Or is it merely unfortunate?

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(The sixth in of a series of seven.)

Nothing in Common

If the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is true, then a couple of images might sum up the debate of over health care reform, and prove representative of the opposing sides.

[Via Preemptive Karma.]

[Via Wikimedia Commons.]

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"The fundamental truth about health care in every country is that national values, national character, determine how each system works."

Prof. Uwe Reinhardt, Princeton Professor & Health Care Economist

"I think health care is a privilege. I wouldn't call it a right."

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC

Drop Dead

Whether or not it's a crisis that millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, that thousands lose their health insurance every day, or that tens of thousands die every year because they lack health insurance is a matter of perspective. The same goes for the economic crisis, the foreclosure crisis, or any other crisis.

Depending on your perspective, there's nothing wrong with hundreds of thousands, or even millions losing their homes to foreclosure. (Even if deregulating the finance sector made it easier to sell them time bombs, in the form of mortgages, that went off long after the people who really matter made an easy buck and moved on.) There's nothing wrong with millions of people having no health insurance, and thus no access to affordable, quality care. There's nothing wrong, because it's all right, and there's no need to do anything about it.

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...[Q]uality care shouldn't depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face. Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.

This is the cause of my life.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, 'The Cause of My Life'

As I noted in the previous post in this series, it can't honestly be said that the reason millions of American's go without health insurance is because we can't afford it. Nor is that the reason why more than 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day, or why:

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Europeans, where universal health care is reality, and has worked quite well for some time now, are looking at the U.S. and wondering why an issue like quality, affordable health care for all — a no-brainer to them — is difficult for us. Can we blame them for wondering if it's because we can't do it or because we just don't want to do it?

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"We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

"Sixty years after Roosevelt's Second Inaugural, that egalitarian test, I think, is still the best measure of our progress and humanity, and the core of The Triumph of Meanness is the contention that as a nation we are failing that test."

Nicolaus Mills, The Triumph of Meanness - America's War Against Its Better Self.

Home of the Mean

As with the election of Barack Obama last fall, the health care reform debate presents us with another opportunity to decide what kind of country we want to be. But that making that choice requires an unvarnished look at the country we have become.

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Not long ago, I wrote that on election night Americans weren't just choosing a president, but choosing the kind of country we want to be. Voting for Barack Obama, on the basis of his campaign platform after eight years of George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, signaled that we were approaching a crossroads as a country and were deciding which road to take.

If this past August is an indication, we're still at that crossroads, shouting at each other over which road to take.

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