The Healthcare Tragedy

The Senate is now debating and amending their healthcare reform bill. It took an enormous political effort and the least possible number of votes just to allow it to be debated, as if it's unworthy of the Senate's time. I don't pretend to know if it will pass, or what will be in any version that does pass, or what if anything will get into law. But whatever the outcome, I have to regard it all as a tragedy.

Tragic partly because the best that's even being proposed only makes the U.S. healthcare system less unjust and less wasteful, and less tragic, while probably further enriching the same people who have created a vastly unjust and inhuman self-serving system exploiting the very lives of vulnerable people for some very literal blood money.

But also tragic for what it has revealed about the civic life of America. Opponents of reform have used outright lies with so little basis in fact that no kindergarten child would get away with anything like them. Yet these transparently false and truly vicious statements get repeated as legitimate assertions, and they become believed.

The suffering of ordinary people is being ignored, and now in perhaps the most shocking moment of all, laughed at and scorned, by other supposedly ordinary people. People who are themselves at risk of losing their savings, their homes, their health and even their lives if they dare to get sick or injured in a way that insurance companies can use to deny them the care they need. People whose hysteria and mob viciousness is being fed by people who probably will never have to face any of this, because they are rich enough to afford the best care. Yet even some of them are likely to suffer from this current system.

Though it is not the only such incident, this moment in Illinois-- where vicious "tea party" people who probably call themselves righteous Christians verbally abused a woman whose daughter-in-law died because she didn't have health insurance--should itself be enough to blow away this fog of insanity that passes as a health care debate. But somehow I won't be surprised if that doesn't happen.

Health care as a right is something the rest of the civilized world has recognized, but here it can't even be politically suggested. It died with Teddy Kennedy.

Yes, I know the monied interests are fueling this. And I recognize the ability through history of a few rich white people to convince the many poor white people that their interests are the same (although I can't think of any reason why it works other than racism and xenophobia), but how much more generally tragic can it be that in the 21st century, the wealthiest nation ever to exist on the planet cannot even recognize the need to reform this destructive system and at least try to deal with the widespread suffering it causes, especially when it can easily do something that will be to its economic benefit and in its own national interest.

Well, there's the intense denial of the Climate Crisis, ultimately a bigger tragedy. But right at this historic moment, there doesn't seem a deeper one for this country than healthcare reform. It tests our soul, as well as the ability of our discourse to deal with increasingly complex and threatening problems.

For all I know a healthcare reform law will emerge that will save lives, prevent so much injustice, and begin to tame the power of rapacious corporate interests and their cannibalism called healthcare insurance. And perhaps the nation will look back on this debate with shame and disbelief, and history will record this debate as a tragedy as well as a travesty.