I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
I prefer to look ahead, but this week I failed to escape history.
First TV aired those dim videotapes of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, 40 years ago. Then Walter Cronkite’s death prompted replays of the Apollo 11 images as well as other defining 20th Century moments.
I was a producer working the moon shot at ABC-TV News, but my memories are trivial. And I helped put together an “instant” documentary on Lyndon Johnson in the hours after JFK’s death, but — dazed and intent on the film — I don’t remember a lot.
These big events distract, anyway, from history’s arcs, which are more useful.
This may explain why our health care debate is so earth-bound. Allow me, then, to sketch 20th Century politics and economics (too broadly, too simply) for context:
Laissez-faire capitalism created extraordinary wealth and huge misery, sowing the seeds of authoritarian “isms.” Communism — Arthur Koestler called it “The God That Failed” — was lots worse than the disease. That’s one reason it failed.
Also, the West responded wisely. Europe and North America adapted to economic challenges (e.g., the Great Depression) and extremist politics by inventing the welfare state, which provided economic security while maintaining freedom.
These fetters on capitalism (promoted, notably, by Europe’s Christian Democrats) went further over there than here, but even our mild New Deal dampened extremism, helped the weakest and promoted a middle class.
Europe’s “mixed economies” (and Canada’s) included universal, affordable, tax-supported healthcare. Ours didn’t.
Thus, we’re laggards in achieving social justice.
And we have failed to stabilize our economy long-term or inoculate ourselves against the next rigged-market meltdown. Because, forgetting history, we succumbed again, with Reaganism, to laissez-faire pipe dreams.
Not only did we erase New Deal buffers against its “animal spirits,” but set the market loose to attack previously sacrosanct areas.
First, business repealed church-inspired “blue laws” banning commerce on Sunday. The market invaded professions next, including education, the law (read any New Mexico billboards lately?) and, of course, medicine.
Long gone is the doctor as guild member rendering pro bono service, well paid if not filthy rich, and beneficiary of huge psychic income. He’s entrepreneur or employee now. Gone, too, most nonprofit hospitals and nonprofit insurers.
Today, health care is big business, doctoring a commodity — no different from sweatpants or corn futures.
What nonsense!
Since I won’t die from lousy sweatpants, it’s clear that buying them differs from buying health care. Also, I can choose athletic gear at leisure, considering fabric, color and price, whereas my options are limited when, say, cancer strikes.
Think: in extremis, do you want a physician whose first responsibility is you or — alternatively — an MD constrained by the fiscal health of the corporation he or she works for?
Before answering, hear market prophet Milton Friedman. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” was the headline on his famous sermon in 1970.
This means patients come second, after profit. So if insurers evade sick people, sometimes cancel coverage in mid-illness and routinely ration care — they’re supposed to.
The alternative is to treat health care as a human right, cover everybody and pay for it with progressive taxes. That’s what every other industrial nation does, spending less and getting better results.
Health care reform should be one giant leap for American democracy. Instead (and I fault the president’s policy wonk approach), we have Congressional infighting wherein corporate and other discrete interests exploit technical issues to protect profits or turf against the common good.
Over forty years ago, President Kennedy used “national security” to fund a bureaucracy (yes, a government bureaucracy got us to the moon) which pulverized tough technical barriers to space travel. President Obama doesn’t have that motivational tool today.
Or does he?
