Health Care FINALLY Part 1

All right. Now that health care has finally passed (state lawsuits notwithstanding), I want to take a look at the arguments against health care and what's actually IN the bill. I won't be looking at the costs of the bill, as I'll explain in the next paragraph. The CBO says that it'll reduce the deficit, the republicans argue that's wrong, I don't know and really don't care. BECAUSE:

ARGUMENT 1: IT'LL COST TOO MUCH.

This should not be about money. We call ourselves a Christian country. If we're going to do that, then we need NEED to behave as Christians IE doing our best to follow the teachings of Christ. And Christ spoke out uniformly against the gathering of wealth and uniformly for helping the poor. These are the two most common threads in his teachings. "To follow me, sell all that you have and give the money to the poor." "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go through the gates of heaven." "Store up not treasure on Earth where thieves steal and moths corrupt." "That which you do unto the least of these, my brothers, you do also unto me." See what I'm saying?

I was in a cigar room in Houston, TX last weekend and found myself in conversation with a group of very intelligent, very thoughtful people. One of these identified himself by the same non-existent affiliation that I hold: liberal republican. He also made the same lamentation that I have heard from many republicans in this day and age; that he felt abandoned by his party. Like Bob Barr, he didn't leave the republican party, the republican party left him. One thing that he said struck a resonant chord with me. He was a little older than me, fifteen years or so, and he commented that when he was a kid if there was someone in his community who needed help, the community simply HELPED them. They didn't ask how much it would cost, they just did it. I remember, from my own childhood in a small town, my grandmother and others bringing food baskets to a neighbor who had lost his job. And we were pretty poor. Not living on handouts ourselves or anything, but just getting by.

So to me, the cost argument is completely irrelevant. Also, the city of San Francisco HAS a public health care option (much more than our federal bill offers) and they are one of the few cities in California to actually REDUCE their deficit over the last few years.

ARGUMENT 2: IT'LL PUT THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY OUT OF BUSINESS

Well, let me answer that in two parts. The first part is "no it won't" and the second part is "so what if it did?"

I say "no it won't" because part of the bill creates insurance pools that Americans can buy insurance from. From PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES.

The second part of my argument derives from the fact that I view private insurance companies as being unethical and borderline criminal. Insurance companies started off like car insurance. I pay premiums, if I get sick you pay the bills. The mega-profits that private insurance has seen over the last twenty years or so have come from DENIAL of coverage. Seventy percent of your insurance premiums are converted directly to profit, with about thirty percent actually going to coverage. That sucks. Hopefully the requirement in this bill that sixty percent of premiums go to care and forty percent to profits will honest the industry up a little, although I really have no doubt that they'll find some way around it.

ARGUMENT 3: POLLS SHOW THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICAN PEOPLE OPPOSE HEALTH CARE.

First off, bullshit. The largest numbers that I have seen, on polls sponsored by F-word News is 50%. That's not a vast majority, that's half.

Also, I realize that republicans want to pretend that the Bush years never happened, but they did. And to refresh your memory, polls show that the VAST MAJORITY of the American people (seventy to eighty percent) opposed the war in Iraq. That neither stopped nor slowed the advance to war.

ARGUMENT 4: IT WILL INCREASE THE DEFICIT

I won't belabor this point, I've made it before, but where were you deficit hawks between 2000 and 2008 when our deficit went from five trillion to ten trillion dollars, largely to support the mess in Iraq?

Okay, either later today or early next week I'll post a rundown of what is ACTUALLY in the bill (no death panels), depending on time.

Peace.

Rev. Randal