There has been a lot of discussion and disagreement with the health care bill; which, by the way, I hope is just a first step in the process of nationalizing it. A lot of people disagree with me and think I am either crazy or stupid. I have to admit that most of the people who have spoken to me about this and feel this way are family. Others are probably too polite to criticize so harshly.
We all know that the cost of health care for Americans is inching, no galloping, higher. And along with the rising cost of health care goes the cost of insurance to help pay for health care. Many lower and middle income people are being squeezed out from being able to afford medical care of any type. I believe we, as a country, cannot afford to let any segment of our population fall through the health care cracks. We need to take care of our own.
We cannot leave this care in the hands of big business and the insurance companies; they don't exactly have a history of helping the underdog, or compassion for anything but the bottom line.
The United States has made tremendous changes over the last 234 years. Our founding fathers intentionally made the Constitution a bit vague. They knew the country would grow; but they had no idea how much, or what changes in technology would evolve. When this country declared its independence, the population was small. Families helped each other out; everyone knew his neighbor and offered what help they could when times were hard. The citizens took care of friends and neighbors. Today, very few of us even know who are neighbors are. It is a dog-eat-dog world and every man and woman must care for him or herself.
Yet we still live in the United States, the most blessed nation in the world (at least most of its citizens think so). We must take care of our own. If we individually don't know our neighbors and don't help to take care of them, we have no choice but to appoint the government as caretaker.
I am not ignorant of the fact that our government seems to make a muddle of a lot of programs it is responsible for, but I think it is up to us, the people of the US, to elect the right people and make our voices known that we think the government should and will be held accountable. We deserve the best government possible, but we also have to be the best overseers we can be. This does not mean listening to talk show hosts who try to tear the government down without offering suggestions for making it better. This is not condoning violent protest. We need to know what our representative is doing, and he or she needs to know we are watching.
Could the nationalization of health care be the beginning of the citizens actually overseeing what the government does so that it will do it right? After all, we have a government of the people and for the people.
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The founding fathers may not have known exactly how much the country would grow or how technology would impact us, but they knew that government involvement in rectifying the divisions and inequalities created by growth and technology would be a normal and necessary thing, as is shown by what James Madison had to say in 1787 when he wrote this excerpt from Federalist paper #10...
ReplyDelete"A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government."