Universal Health Care Access

Do you have health insurance? If you do, does the provider cover most of your needs with affordable co-payments? Can you choose your own doctor or are you limited to a list of "participating physicians"? If you try to choose from among "participating physicians", have you ever been told by one of them that they are no longer accepting new patients? If you are unrestricted in your choice of doctors, have you ever been told that he/she "doesn't accept" your insurance?

I can think of many more questions, but the ones I have posed cover many complaints of insured people, even those with so-called "Cadillac" benefits. Many would say that they have a Cadillac that is practically useless because no one gave them the keys or forgot to mention that the maintenance charges to keep it running outstrip the cost of a new car.

There isn't much dispute among Americans that the health care in this country - at least when you can get it - is frequently on the cutting edge, the best in the world. We have better and more diagnostic equipment, better facilities, the best trained physicians. I have always thought that we like to say these kinds of things because the US is a nation that loves and in some ways, was founded on superlatives. In this fantasy, nobody is ordinary. All children are "gifted", all our workers are "the hardest working", our food choices are the most varied, etc., etc., etc. It's almost as if we are afraid that if we looked at some of our institutions with a more critical eye and found out that there were some significant flaws, that our whole national identity would deflate like those big Christmas lawn ornaments. Who are we if we're not the most free, the smartest and the richest? Are we then just 300+ million people sitting on good topsoil, driving gigantic cars while running out of petroleum? Of course not.

Out of the context of health care as a specific issue, it's important to remember that our addiction to superlatives spreads far beyond a single issue. For example, if everyone is brilliant, then no one is brilliant. "Brilliant" becomes "average". I will never forget the day that I went through orientation as an undergraduate student at Cornell University back in the early 80s. The dean of my college said (in a very nice way), "Welcome to Cornell. Wherever you may have come from, you were probably the valedictorian or something close to that. You were considered "brilliant" by your family and your peers. Look around you at your new classmates. At Cornell, until you do something pretty extraordinary, you are now average. There is nothing wrong with that. I hope it makes you work harder." I walked out of that auditorium feeling absolutely stupid. It wasn't because I thought I was brilliant or that I did not belong there, notwithstanding my sweet parents who unwittingly set me up for disappointment. It was because I thought that it ever really mattered or that there was some objective way of determining who was and who wasn't.

It's not just ordinary Americans who get caught in this nationalist superiority trap. Our clergy practically invented it. Either a religion says through its leaders that it is the only way to salvation or that the US is God's favorite country. I always love hearing that one. One day Texas belongs to Mexico. Before too long it joins the US after we kill enough Mexicans to call it ours. The territory immediately becomes the equivalent of God's newest friend on Facebook. For the truly religious reading this, I apologize for sounding so glib. I don't mean to be disrespectful. I know many thinking, good people who do their best to adhere to the tenets of their respective faiths but only when they are used for good and not as justifications for going to war or killing legislation that would keep uninsured people with stomach aches out of emergency rooms.

By the way, who is Jerry Fallwell to tell us that he is the only guy with a direct speaking relationship to God and that the 9/11 attacks were, in part, God's punishment for tolerating gays and lesbians in the US? I would say the same thing to Muslim clerics who apparently have Mohammed's cell number and know first-hand that the prophet is adamant that Israel must be destroyed, but only after killing a few thousand American civilians and soldiers. As insane as that is, there are clearly people who believe it.

My point is this: if we are unwilling to look carefully at the policies that have brought us to a point where millions of Americans are uninsured, we are stuck in that same trap of perceived superlatives that will permit our elected officials to leave things as they are. I hope we do not let them get away with that.