He's Dead, Jim

This is hardly of interest to the general public, but my 14 year old son played his first high-school junior varsity football game last week. He is the left offensive tackle, as he is big and slow like me. He is however, far from slow-witted and he has a talent for ironic rhetorical flourish that even I am envious of. Anyway, where I’m going with this is that football is a physical game, and sometimes people get hurt; sometimes badly hurt. My 16 year old son was hit by a car while riding his bike in a race several weeks ago. Of course, he was not wearing a helmet, despite being admonished repeatedly by both parents to do so (the State of Florida does not require helmets if you are at least 16). Fortunately the car was going pretty slow, but he did sustain a nasty gash to the head and a moderately severe concussion and was in the emergency room for observation for several hours. This little adventure resulted in over $9,000 in charges for medical treatment.

I recount this family trivia as a segue into some brief observations the whole sordid American extortion racket known as healthcare. I use such dismal terms to describe the process of treating American’s ills because the threat of premature death is a powerful motivator for most people, a motivator which can be exploited by the profit-minded, and the illusion that we can live unhealthy lives and still be healthy people (promoted largely by the medical industry) has taken hold to the extent that the average person has no idea how much of their wealth evaporates with every piece of fried chicken they eat.

Now I am not one of those paranoid Liberals that sees a soulless predator lurking behind every corporate logo; however, I am one of those paranoid Liberals who sees systems that become more than the sum of their parts and understands that good and decent people can do really wretched things, especially when they don’t understand what they’re doing. Just like the American economic and political systems work largely to the benefit of individuals by the ironic virtue of being more preeminent and ungovernable than those individuals themselves, the American healthcare system often works to the detriment of individuals by the less than ironic virtue of being a profit-driven industry. The system has become the sum of the myriad decisions made by thousands of individual corporate employees acting largely without coordination or strategic analysis, resulting in the incredibly expensive chaos we all mostly now take for granted.

Before somebody drops the “S” word, I am not yet advocating socialized medicine, at least not in our lifetimes, and clearly there is no moral failure associated with working hard and taking risks in order to profit from an investment, but certain services have been typically provided by the government in America, such as law enforcement, fire suppression, potable water, sanitary sewer and all our lovely parks, and these are not profit driven enterprises. These are things which, in civilized nations, are deemed to be the right of every citizen to enjoy, even if by virtue of economic status some citizens are actually asked to pay more than their fair share for such services. The Conservatives who bemoan the failure of every element of government still continue to drive to work on the roads the government built, take a crap in the toilet which, post flush, the government assumes responsibility for, use currency printed and regulated by the government and scare old people about losing the government-run healthcare they already have. They also take every opportunity to praise, and, I might add, employ, the Armed Forces of the United States, which is one of the largest government-run enterprises in human history.

So, government probably can do a few things right, and the idea that some of the basic amenities of civilization are actually rights of citizenship is not so foreign to our culture; so why is there such pandemonium at the thought that we should find some way to ensure that all our citizens have some basic level of effective medical care available to them and why has the idea that the massive healthcare/industrial complex should contribute a little of their hundreds of billions of dollars in resources to achieve this become such a flash point? What the hell is wrong with this country?

Every time I go to the doctor, she tells me I am a ticking time-bomb of accumulated bad habits and I should change my ways. I always agree and then continue to fail to be the better person I should be, but if the doctor refused to see me and I swelled up and lost vision in one eye, I probably wouldn’t really be terribly outraged. However, when my rebellious, smart-mouthed son was sitting in that hospital bed with a solidly thumped brain as a result of his own irresponsibility, I was getting ready to throw some furniture to get some immediate attention. Anybody who has ever cared about anyone knows that watching a loved-one suffer and die is the greatest pain a human can experience (just watch The Dark Knight). The pain felt by our children is far more difficult to accept than the genetically programmed horror of our own demise, perhaps because at some level we understand we will not be left to miss ourselves.

So this is what we are debating; should we try to make as much quality health care available to as many of our citizens as practically possible, or should we simply work to ensure that the Hospital Corporation of America continues to reap record profits each and every year? Should we love our neighbors as we love ourselves or should we just say may the devil take the hind-most? Should millions of Americans be at risk to watch their friends and family members weaken and slip away just so a precious few can indulge an obscene bacchanalia of hypocrisy and greed? Why do we even have to ask this question?