Gene's Blog

Health Care

Tonight I want to talk about what I think is a national disgrace. 47 million Americans have no health insurance. A letter in todays paper quoted Minnesota’s last true progressive politician, Hubert Humphrey as saying:

“…the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life – the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

The letter writer then suggested that it is time our government take this moral test. You will have noted in previous posts, that I have strong feelings about the moral responsibilities of government. I am a flaming liberal and proud of it. The reason I am is that I was so blessed as to have been born in Minnesota and to grow up during Hubert Humphrey’s greatest days. I still think it a national tragedy that this large-hearted man never became President of the United States, we would be a better country for having had his legacy to live up to nationally. We, here in Minnesota, aren’t even trying anymore ourselves.

On the page opposite page the Letters section, the paper devoted a full third page to an article written by two men representing the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Health Policy Studies, Andrew Grossman and Robert Moffit. Why is it that these conservative think-tanks feel this need to name themselves for actions and ideas that make them sound as if they are FOR something? When the truth is they are for nothing but getting government out of their lives and cutting taxes to the bone? They think they should be able to live in this wonderful land for free, that somehow schools, hospitals, police and fire, and highways, always highways, will just magically appear from nothing. They got theirs, dammit, and the rest of us had just better sit down and shut up about it or get our own ourselves. Including the children, the elderly, the sick, the needy and the handicapped. Those two “gentlemen” and their organizations FAIL that moral test. Morality to them is everyone else doing what we are told and letting the top 10% of this country consume 60% of the worlds resources while they bomb into insurgency everyone around the world who has the temerity to question why so few should have so much at the expense of so many. They are not good global citizens. They are not good people. They are here to show the rest of us who we are not.

I am proud to stand in Hubert Humphrey’s shadow and support those dreams he so eloquently proposed and spent his entire life fighting for. We do NOT treat ANY of the people mentioned in that quotation well. I wrote a day or two ago about what has happened to education here in Minnesota, that what was once the province of government, has now become “charter” schools for the wealthiest children, while those in most need, now get 5 days of kindergarten every two weeks, every day kindergarten is costing my son and his family, plus a little after school care, $822 a month. We spend our time trying to figure ways to keep people from being eligible for those few programs we still provide. We do not care that many of our own sleep outside because they can’t afford shelter. We don’t care that our elderly take half or less of their needed medications because they simply can’t afford to pay the cost of taking them all. And we don’t give a rats butt about the sick, the needy or the handicapped, dammit. We got ours, let them get their own. And we wonder why we have gang problems in the inner city. When children are raised to believe there is no hope, they find it for themselves. When there are no after school programs to teach them, help them, tutor them, they turn to each other for support. And you know what? They are not really the best role models for each other. But we don’t care about that. We care about a cabin on the lake and an SUV to haul the boat up there a few months of the year. And that is about all we care about, ourselves. We are a society that shames the species. That shames our heritage, that allows an organization to call itself the Heritage Foundation when it fights desperately against everything our heritage was. There was a time in this country when we tried to do what Hubert suggested, that time began dying with the Reagan administration and we have been sliding into the pit of greed and avarice ever since.

These two guys who wrote the article I referenced, Backers of Health Plan For Kids Have Other Motives, were incensed because it turns out that some people who are so wealthy that they have had to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (a tax designed to ensure that those sneaky really rich people could not shelter ALL of their income from taxation) have been eligible for this program, or their children have. What they missed, apparently, is that for YEARS, every tax season has seen a flurry of articles about how Congress did not index that tax for inflation and so it has slowly gobbled up huge chunks of money from people who are hardly wealthy, while of course the really wealthy, that upper 10%, have found ever more creative ways to avoid paying their fair share at all, the AMT now grabs couples who are living paycheck to paycheck just like most of us, and practically bankrupts them. And, each year columnists wring their hands and Congress insists it will fix it, and each year, they do NOTHING about it. So, yes, some people who have had the bulk of their income confiscated by a law never intended to touch them, may have been eligible to have their children covered under this program. And, the writers were absolutely shocked that some states have expanded their programs to include uninsured adults. By gawd that ought to be a crime. If you can’t find a job that pays health insurance for you, then you simply do not deserve health care coverage. In all this, they see not a program that could use some fine-tuning, or an AMT that MUST be fixed, no, they see a vast left wing conspiracy to create a government monopoly on health care. Uh huh. That’s the danger they rail against. That government might somehow make sure ALL Americans have health care coverage. And it might take tax dollars to do that.

Well, those two organizations, unsurprisingly, are great fans of military spending and our pacification of the terrorist problem in Iraq. Which, of course, HAD no terrorist problem until we got there and also supplied precisely NONE of the people who flew those plans into American towers. We could insure our entire country for a pittance of the $480,000,000 we have spent trying to drive terrorists out of Iraq. So successfully, I might add, that five minutes after the last American soldier leaves that country, a civil war will break out, only, of course, if we don’t call what is happening there now, a civil war. Isn’t that just the silliest transposition of terms? As if a war could EVER be “civil”. Excuse me, sir, while I behead your friends, so sorry for the mess.

So here, I want to come back to CWG, book 1, page 50, “…You can similarly end all war tomorrow. Simply. Easily. All it takes – all it has EVER taken – is for all of you to agree. Yet if you cannot agree on something as simple as ending the killing of each other, how can you call upon the heavens with shaking fist to put your life in order? I will do nothing for you that you will not do for your self. That is the law and the prophets. The world is in the condition it is because of YOU, and the choices you have made, or failed to make.”

That is God’s truth. What we see around us in this country, in this world, God did not do to us, we did it to ourselves. We aren’t content even with killing ourselves, we are hellbent on killing the planet too, though that is but a human conceit. We can certainly make the planet uninhabitable for some time, but eventually the earth will just spit us out, and over some eons, replenish itself. Maybe with a sentient species then that can understand, grasp and believe in the principle of unconditional love. Maybe with a teacher who can say when you have done this unto the least of my children, you have done it unto me. Maybe with people who can embrace and understand that teaching and make IT the center of life. Love IS the answer to every question. I don’t know why I read newspapers, all that is in them is evidence that we not only don’t understand the question, we don’t want to. We want to love only those just like us and we want to kill all the rest. What a world we’ve created. What a species we have become, spread over this globe like a deadly plague, spewing bombs and bullets heedlessly. We no longer even restrict those activities to people who signed up to do such things, ostensibly in defense of their lands, but we now kill civilians indiscriminately and promise each other paradise for such sacrificial horrors. Sometimes we just are disgusting.

Doesn’t anyone else think it is time this species grew the hell up? Isn’t it time for people, good, caring people to stand up and tell those purveyor’s of hatred, separation, greed and death, that we have had ENOUGH and we are saying when? There are movements around the world of quiet-voiced peaceful people, who need to raise their voices, help raise the level of public discourse, turn our attention away from those things that divide us, develop common goals that will help governments around the globe pass the moral test Hubert Humphrey posed? Those of us who believe what he said, well, I think we have our own moral obligation, to find our voice, and the courage to speak our truth, and to insist that the carnage stop, on all sides of all issues. It is time we stopped hating each other and started loving each other. We’re going to talk a lot more about that here in days to come. Because it is a topic I never tire of. Will never tire of. When I leave this plane and return home, I am STILL going to be standing on a podium somewhere talking about love. Because home is where love is all there is, where all are safe and cared for. Why can’t we make this place a little bit like that? Why can’t we make this place home too? I absolutely believe we can. But we can never tire in that pursuit. Those who write such horrid things as in that article I referenced, who do such horrid things as the acts I have described, as we see on the nightly news NIGHTLY, must be stopped.

We can unlearn the teachings of our history. I recommend a wonderful movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” as a beginning to understanding just how we can overcome our emotional addiction to responding to disappointment with violence. I recommend absorbing Conversations With God, Books 1 and 2, as a way to start the spiritual healing this planet, its people so desperately need. And then I recommend talking about these “new” ideas with everyone you meet. Engage with each other, understand each other, love each other. Don’t worry about the particulars of that love, as Sarah McLachlan sings, “Your love is better than chocolate, better than anything else that I’ve tried.” And she’s right. In the end, Love is all that is worth living for. Whatever form that love takes is irrelevant, this time, in THIS time, let love win. Let love finally win. Hatred has had its day and it is time for children of a new dawn to take their place at the front of the line and let love become our watchword, our path and our way. much love, :^) gene