Health Care Debate: The Theme is Them

The Obama Era began a year ago today. So what do I hear on a public radio segment marking the anniversary? Another debate about health care reform. Okay. But I don't hear anything new or innovative. The core of the debate once again cratered on themes on costs and allocation (that is, the cost of sharing). How will we pay for more if we can't pay for what we have?

I wish my fellow travelers on public radio would stop pretending that the theme of this national colloquy is “What can we pay for?” It isn't. Talk about cost buries the true subject matters - capitalism, nationalism, and fear.

Deep in their dark hearts and minds far too many opponents of health care reform have a fundamental problem with insuring everybody, including children, and the problem has nothing to do with cost.

“We’ve got ours BECAUSE WE DESERVE IT and you can’t have it because YOU AREN'T ONE OF US” - the subtext to the national discussion about control and funding of local education - infects the health care debate.

The ugly side of libertarianism - the atavistic American "virtue" of self-reliance raising its ugly NIMBY head. Few of those anti-reform citizens who are not poor, not jobless, and reasonably healthy would actually come out and say it, but in their reptile brains they oppose health care for the poor, the jobless, the less than healthy, the first generationals, and their children because those people should just get less poor and less jobless and more healthy and if they just got here (say, in the past 30 years) they should just go home and take their children with them. Not only are they taking my schools from me but now they're hogging the seats at my pediatrician's/dentist's/ob-gyn's office.

Tell me I'm wrong.