As the ongoing debate about health care reform reaches its climax, I often find myself wondering what I would do if I were in a position to be a leading voice on this subject. If I were a Senator from the great state of New Jersey, what would I have to say on this subject? What kind of speech would I deliver to both inspire my supporters and build a bridge to my opponents?
Posted below is the answer.
The conventional wisdom has it that health care reform is un-American.
The thing about conventional wisdom, that I have noticed, is that while it is often conventional, it is rarely particularly wise. Such is the case with the common held belief that guaranteeing health care to every one of our citizens somehow goes against the grain of American values. This is a big lie that, as a particularly infamous propagandist once noted, has started to be taken for granted as true through constant repetition. Yet few of the people who believe in this big lie have bothered asking themselves the most basic of all questions: What is America?
America is not a race or a creed or a set of borders. America is not a collection of institutions, be they insurance companies in Hartford or big banks on Wall Street or lobbying headquarters in Washington. America is an idea – a single, simple idea, one that was given its first and greatest articulation by Thomas Jefferson when he wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
“To secure these rights” – that is, “the unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – THAT is the reason why “governments are instituted among men”.
Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does Jefferson say, “Governments should secure these rights, unless that involves creating a public option”. Nowhere does it say that these rights are guaranteed “except when the president fighting for them is a man named Barack Obama”. Nowhere does it say that these rights are guaranteed to all except those who don’t earn enough money to afford a high cost health insurance premium, or that they are secured except when contradicted by a financially well-heeled interest group and the politicians whose coffers it lubricates.
What Jefferson wrote, once again, was this:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
So to the opponents of health care reform, all over the nation, we ask the following questions:
Is it possible to have life without high quality health care, such as will provide you with the medical treatment you need when you’re sick, and which will assist you in remaining healthy when you are well? If the answer is no, then how can you oppose legislation that will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of previous medical conditions, or from dropping people from their plans after they become sick?
Is it possible to be free when, in order to perform the simple act of staying alive and healthy, one must pay more than one can afford, or else take on crippling debt? If the answer is no, then how can you oppose a bill that would put a cap on how much senior citizens can be charged for prescription drugs and limit the amount of money insurance companies can demand patients pay in out-of-pocket expenses?
Is it possible to pursue happiness if, because you do not earn enough money to afford health insurance, any medical procedure – from a needed visit to the emergency room to a simple check-up with a family doctor – could lead to your ruin? If the answer is no, then how can you oppose a government-run health insurance plan that does not forcibly enroll anyone, but which everyone is allowed to join, so that all citizens can at last have access to health care, regardless of their financial status?
In a very real sense, the debate over health care reform in this country is only a symptom, a fragment of a much larger struggle over the definition of the American soul. On the one side, you have individuals on the right and so-called center who denounce as “socialist” and “un-American” not only health care reform – not only health care reform – but economic stimulus packages that can help out-of-work Americans find good-paying jobs, and financial regulations that can protect homeowners from predatory banks, and legislation that can help Americans form labor unions so that our nation’s workforce can have real power with which to fight for its own interests. Within these circles, it is fashionable to view the government as a malevolent entity to be hated and weakened.
On the other side, you have those who recognize that a democratic government – a TRUE democratic government – is neither a god to be worshipped nor a demon to be feared. They understand that, in a democracy, the government is nothing more than the sum of the people who live within it. The first Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, understood this when – in the midst of a battle he fought against a corrupt and overly powerful bank of his own time – he wrote that “it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes” because “there are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses”. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, also understood this when he famously declared that the government of America is one “of the people, by the people, for the people” – not as an enemy of the people, to be kept separate from and feared by them, but as an instrument owned by the people, one that allows them to control their own lives and which is as good, bad, or indifferent as they themselves choose to make it.
That is the larger battle which we are fighting. Today fifty million Americans suffer because they don’t have health insurance. They need help. Yet there are those who have much to gain – be it money or power or self-affirmation of their ideological dogma – by not helping those people. They will construct all sorts of elaborate arguments and rationalizations to justify seeing to it that these people aren’t helped. Some of what they say is so ghastly that it is meant to frighten you into agreement; some is so idealistic that it’s objective is to seduce you into complacency; some is so complex that it’s supposed to confuse you into ac quiescence, or at least frustrated indifference.
Yet even as they bombard us with these assertions – even as they say, in a thousand-and-one ways, that the government is not to be trusted – what they will have us overlook is the fact that THIS IS OUR GOVERNMENT. It isn’t the politicians’ government, and it isn’t the pundits’ government; it isn’t the corporations’ government or the lobbyists’ government; it isn’t the interest groups’ government or the Tea Party and town hall zealots’ government. It is ALL OF OUR government. Even though those groups claim it as an exclusive property of their own, it is also the property of the uninsured and the unemployed and the disadvantaged everywhere, even though it does not serve them as well as it serves the others. It belongs to us – every single one of us. It was created – instituted among us – deriving its just powers from us – to secure our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the basis upon which our entire political structure exists. That is the backbone upon which our nation was founded. That, in short, IS AMERICA. And it is on America that we, the fighters for health care reform, stake our claim.
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