Promoting the General Welfare

Promoting the General Welfare
Saturday, September 19, 2009

Last Thursday, September 17 was Constitution Day, which as holidays go gets infinitely less noticed than the made up marketing holidays like Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day or my personal choice for silliest holiday, Cinco de Mayo. It says a lot about our society that we get more fired up over some obscure 19th century battle between Mexico and France than we do about the commemoration of our guiding legal document that has done more to guarantee stable and workable government and protection of individual rights in our country, and has had a great impact on human rights and freedom around the globe.

The preamble to our Constitution refers to the ideals of our nation, including such lofty concepts as ensuring domestic tranquility (a topic for another column but something that is increasingly on the decline in our contentious culture) and establishing justice. It also references a primary job of our government as promoting the general welfare. I contend that this task of government was important enough for the framers and founding fathers to include in such a prominent spot, and therefore should rightly be a major concern. Education, environmental protection, economic security, and certainly health care qualify as promoting the general welfare, and therefore are proper for the purview of the federal, as well as state governments.

So let’s stop acting as if the goal of providing affordable quality care to all of our citizens is some form of nefarious socialism and a way for the government to control our lives. In the middle of all the summer vitriol at town hall meetings across this great land, one of the most inane confrontations was the uneducated but apparently quite wealthy (she didn’t even know how much money her husband made apparently, how nice is that?) woman from Pennsylvania who got her 15 minutes of fame ranting about how she wants to go back to what our founding fathers would want. I’m quite sure she couldn’t name three founding fathers, but aside from her ignorance about politics, which only puts her in the same class as the majority of our uneducated and politically illiterate culture (on both the right and left I might add) she expressed a desire to return to our political roots. Promoting the general welfare is a vital part of this original ideology.

In my 10th grade history course the other day I had my students read from Heraclitus, a 5th century BCE Greek philosopher who predates the great Socrates. One of the quotes chosen had to do with doctors charging for services rendered that they didn’t have any business performing, let alone charging exorbitant prices for. The ancient Greeks didn’t have HMO’s, so the analogy isn’t perfect, but it didn’t take long for the discussion to turn to our health care debate, especially as I always encourage my students to draw analogies and relate the themes of history to modern and contemporary issues. The point here is that we can learn a lot from our younger generation, they see the issue in terms of basic fairness and provision of needed services for the population. The other point is that the medical industry (if you include insurance providers in that industry) has been gouging, or in the words of Heraclitus, burning, racking, and stabbing the consumer for around 2500 years. It’s about time that comes to an end.

It is not the purpose of this column to provide specific solutions, nor is it my intent to gloss over the difficult and complex issues that must be dealt with. Any reform must include cost controls so that our federal deficit doesn’t continue to balloon like Newt Gingrich or Keith Olberman’s waistline. The notion of cost controls also must put an onus on the consumer, who must start taking better care of themselves, avoid the drive through line at the nearest fast-food joint, get some exercise and mix in something fresh and green in their diets at least once in awhile.

The insurance industry is not evil and as a private industry they should be entitled to a reasonable profit, but they are an important cog in a wheel which provides a necessity and should be regulated the same way we regulate public utilities. While I do have my doubts about a government run program given the track record of publicly run entities, I’m not sure I see viable alternatives at this point. When held up to the light of the inadequacy of the current system and the burden it puts on workers and employers alike, a public option doesn’t look quite so bad to me.
When the private sector can’t or won’t get the job done, the public sector has a place and even an obligation to step up to the plate. Government per se is not the enemy of the people (although many of the ridiculous right would have you believe otherwise, at least during times when their party isn’t in control) and not every public program is automatically socialism. There is a fundamental difference in both kind and degree between socialism and redistribution of wealth. Meaningful health care reform will require the latter and need not morph or slide down the slippery slope into the former, despite what the right wing demagogues are ranting and raving about at every turn.

This issue has been on the back burner for far too long, and like a cancerous tumor will not heal simply by ignoring it. Yet that’s what many propose we do, and despite the rhetoric the Democratic controlled Congress seems more than happy to play along. So far they have failed to produce a truly liberal (in the definitive sense of the word, meaning advocating reform and positive change) bill, and has spent the past week debating whether and how to punish a fellow member for popping off to the president. Meanwhile another week just goes by and the problem continues to fester and worsen with nary a legitimate solution in sight. One need not have the wisdom of a philosopher to realize that we can’t afford to go another 2500 years without a solution, let alone another political cycle, which is exactly where we are headed if the forces of reasonable reform get drowned out amidst the flood of distractions and politics as usual.