We’ve seen this movie before

I was in a drugstore this week near the University of New Mexico. The recession’s hit the area hard. A hot and tired older woman in a wheel chair ahead of me in the cashier’s line seemed verging on exasperation as she counted out her change for a small purchase.

I got to wondering about what her life would be like if it weren’t for Americans of conscience and compassion, golden rule Americans and the politicians they elect, politicians who voted for the Americans with Disabilities Act, for Social Security, for the Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI) program for people with disabilities, for Medicaid and Medicare, and other social programs.

Would she be able to live at all without such help? Would she have been just put on the junk pile and left to suffer and die?

I know the skinflints, tightwads and government haters would have treated her like a statistic, and jingoized about welfare cheats, and just scratched her off and let her fend for herself. Out of sight, out of mind.

A while back, an old friend of mine who had a terrible motorcycle accident when a car hit him, would never have been able to keep body and soul together with his brain injuries without SSI. But it took him a year of hardship and economic panic to get it after he applied, and the regulations were so stringent he could not save a cent for fear of losing everything and was effectively under fiscal house arrest, so tight were his circumstances.

He’d have been thrown on the junk heap too.

Another friend, a poet and scholar of great gifts and a wide network of admirers, but no formal credentials, was reduced to living on the streets by a series of job losses, thefts and job related illnesses. When he turned 65, he had to get the help of friends to fill out the Social Security and SSI forms. He didn’t have a car or a computer or the money for a cab, and couldn’t walk very well. Once he got the funds, though, he managed to find a little place, and lived his last years in relative security. Without public help, he’d have died a decade earlier.

Compassionate, moral American voters and politicians saved his life.

The skinflints and cheapskates with their big salaries and big cars, and fancy lobbiests with their ideological automatons in Congress wouldn’t have heard a whimper over their callous defense of “principles” and abstractions about the less government the better.

And it’s the same today as always. Now we have some 50 million Americans without health insurance. If they are not eligible for Medicare, they might as well be playing Russian roulette with their incomes, savings, health and their family’s well being. If they hold down two jobs, begin to tire, lose their appetite, have stress related high blood pressure and become less efficient at work, they get sacked. If they happen to be a month away from Medicare or three decades away, they’re subject to dying prematurely, or becoming disabled, or even homeless, having their health care rationed by lack of wealth.

But the misers and people who think government is the work of the devil, don’t care about them. Nor do they care about the households that pay more for health insurance than for their mortgages, only to find themselves dropped from their plans or denied coverage when they really need it.

This isn’t a matter of political philosophy. This isn’t “macroeconomics,” and “the wisdom of the market,” or a Jeffersonian mistrust of government. This is life and death in a world in which waiting too long for the doctor because you can’t afford to see her, nor pay for the prescriptions, being rationed out of the health care system for being poor, can sicken you, disable you, and kill you as dead as any 18-wheeler smashing into your car.

That’s 50 million people at risk.

And the same “me” people and political purists are at it again as they’ve always been, stonewalling health care reform, trying to make it seem like a commie plot from the days of McCarthy witch hunts, or calling Democrats Nazis.

It seems odd that there actually is a political party in America historically aligned against compassionate government. But most of the opposition to welfare, food stamps, SSI, comes from the Republican Party and wayward Democrats, the same folks who vehemently opposed the creation of Social Security in 1935. The overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate fought a losing battle in 1939 to keep dependents and survivors from getting Social Security. What did they think was going to happen to them when the so called “breadwinner” died?

In 1950 and 1956, the majority of Republicans opposed the creation of disability insurance and even defeated it once. In 1965, most of the Republicans in the House and Senate voted to kill Medicare, and in doing so, indirectly, and unsuccessfully, voted to kill off older people like me and the aging members of my family, all in the name of the “principle” that the less government the better.

In 1982, Present Reagan and Senate Republicans came up with the idea to save money by cutting $40 billion in Social Security payments over three years, threatening to impoverish countless American elders and thereby burdening their families with huge financial troubles.

In 1981, not only did President Reagan start taxing Social Security, his administrated began hounding people on SSI, looking for cheaters, carrying out over a half a million IRS-like investigations, traumatizing people who were already so stressed out by life’s vicissitudes they could barely function. More than 100,000 people were purged from SSI. No one knows now how many cheats they actually found. I’m sure the overwhelming majority of the disenfranchised were caught on technicalities like health insurance companies use today to drop customers from their roles. One wonders how many of that 100,000 died suffering in poverty.

But most of the people with money, however it came to them, felt full of rectitude, hounding poor people and bringing them to ground.

Now, once again, the rectitude factor is roaring and sneering. Republicans tisk tisk at Professor Gates balking at being arrested in his own home because he’s an African American, accusing him of behaving badly, while rectitudinal Republican leadership and their Blue Dog Democratic allies say not a word of condemnation of violent and loutish behavior by their own goon squads disrupting public meetings, shouting down proponents of health care reform, and showing complete disrespect toward our elected representatives.

Here we are in the middle of August. We know the old Republican dumb show is trying once again to let the financially unlucky die on the vine of their low to nonexistent wages. But what else do we know for sure?

Health insurance companies spend millions to defeat a reform measure that hardly anyone understands. Pharmaceutical companies back President Obama’s plan, that few understand, as long as health insurance becomes mandatory and no one is regulating drug prices. Mandatory health insurance looks good for insurance and drug companies, but to pull it off, those 50 million uninsured people, who’ve been financially rationed out of health care, have to have a public option that treats them fairly, or most of them will be health insurance outlaws, subject to fines, higher taxes and penalties. Or at least that’s the way it seems at the moment.

We’ve had Social Security for nearly 75 years, through the greatest period of prosperity in our history. Without Social Security, the middle class would not exist, consumer culture would be drained of the expendable incomes it depends on, and millions and millions of elderly, widowed, under-aged, and disabled Americans would have been suffering horribly, reduced to the broken lives of poverty, most of them from no fault of their own.

And here we are again. Republican stonewallers, perhaps in the minority at the moment, simply do not care about the lives and well-being of people less fortunate than themselves. They lack moral imagination. They lack heart. And I pray they lose again this time.