© Charles D. Hayes
When it’s war, or even the threat of war,
we Americans pull out all stops and forge ahead, sparing no effort or expense,
to ensure victory. If needed, we will impose a draft, increase taxes, build
ships, aircraft, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction, the likes of which the
world has ever seen. On land, air, and sea, we will destroy any enemy that
threatens the lives of our citizens. If one of our soldiers is trapped behind
enemy lines, we will send whatever resources it takes to free the individual
from harm. If our troops are killed, we will go to extraordinary lengths to
retrieve their bodies, even risking others’ lives if necessary, and we will
continue these efforts for decades after war ends.
We maintain the largest and most
powerful military force on the planet in order to make it clear that attacking us
will be a suicidal mission. Protecting our citizens is so powerful an ethos
that we will even furnish legal services at public expense when a fellow American
is charged with a crime. After all, this could be a matter of life and death.
Suppose, though, that our fallen
soldier's mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother's life is threatened by an illness
like breast cancer, and she can't afford medical insurance. What do we do then?
Raise armies? Raise taxes? Send forth doctors and surgeons dressed in fatigues?
Not at all. Not only do we stand by and watch them die slowly from a lack of
treatment, but nearly half of our population characterizes attempts to remedy
this moral failure as an assault on their
freedom.
Indeed, in a way, freedom is at play
here—unlimited freedom for profits. The charge that Obamacare is a government
takeover of healthcare, actually means that the government is limiting the
ability of the insurance industry to make runaway profits at the expense of
medical treatment. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to incite
and inspire rage about this alleged loss of personal freedom.
So let's talk about freedom—like the
freedom to continue living when one is attacked by an illness that doesn't require
armies or multi-million dollar bombs to cure, only a health insurance policy that
works more for the benefit of patients rather than for insurance companies. Before
Obamacare, thousands of people hung onto jobs they despised simply because they
were afraid of losing their insurance. That's lack of freedom.
The argument that mandated insurance
coverage results in an actual loss of freedom is such an assault on common
sense and common decency that it defies any and all attempts to explain it in
the context of what it means to be protected under the umbrella of American
citizenship.
The current political polarization motivated
by the millions of dollars spent on behalf of the insurance lobby has become so
vitriolic that much of the goodwill that gives us a sense of national identity as
Americans has been lost. Blind rage stands in for civilized dialogue, as extreme
Tea Party types express an anxious willingness to sink the ship of state and
drown everyone if they can't have everything their own way. They view
themselves as the only true Americans.
Stopping at nothing to prevent a loss of
life in war and then looking the other way when private citizens are threatened—not
by an army, but by a lack of enough monetary resources to cover the cost of
treatment—is a kind of social madness that can only occur when benevolence is
trampled by seething contempt. Such derision is made possible by so alienating
one's opposition as to think them unworthy of being considered one of us. This
has to be the case unless being an American and having one's life threatened is
meaningless. Populist scorn has become so ubiquitous that an audience broke into
cheering at a presidential political debate earlier this year at the mere mention
of letting someone die who had elected not to purchase health insurance.
The current level of political insanity can
be seen for what it is when you realize fully that the blueprint for Obamacare
was drawn up by conservatives and only became toxic when the opposition adopted
it. The push for unfettered profit at the expense of medical care has resulted
in an orchestrated pandemic of political hostility paid for by the insurance
lobby. This is something to keep in mind when you vote in November: War and
serious illness are matters of life and death and should not be considered
profit centers or political talking points.
Our service men and women who have been
killed in battle deserve something more for the relatives they left behind than
derision and alienation because they need a doctor and don't have enough personal
wealth to cover the cost. If the people shouting about mandated insurance
encroaching on their personal freedom would stop listening to the rebel rousers
and simply think, they would realize that the sacrifices our service men and
women have made on the battlefield should cover the cost of those who can't
afford medical treatment. If being an American means anything, it means the
bill has been paid in full.
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