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Sunday, Sep. 27, 2009

Little compassion in health care debate

By Mark Mansperger, In Focus

The debate over health care has brought out some of the worse aspects of America.

A recent Harvard medical study suggests up to 45,000 Americans die each year due to inadequate access to medical care. Millions more are living with treatable pain and illness.

Whether the particular reforms being advocated are the best solution or not is another topic. But it is rather medieval that a country with the incredible wealth of America would be so callous to its own citizens.

Where is the "culture of life" of which George W. Bush spoke?

If terrorists were killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, would those people protesting health care reform be concerned about the high costs of addressing the issue or the expanded role of government in doing so?

In addition to avoidable illness and death, the amount we pay for the health care we do receive is substantially higher than similar care elsewhere. And each year those costs skyrocket, already being a major contributor to personal bankruptcy and threatening to eventually bankrupt our entire nation.

Moreover, the inefficiency of our system is revealed by the fact that the number of people shuffling around paper in our overall medical system is greater than the number of people actually delivering medicine. If we were to redirect the money paid to medical bureaucracy and insurance companies, we would be able to pay for the proposed reforms.

The problems with our medical system are so vast as to make it rather astounding that so many Americans have a "don't rock the boat" attitude. What is the source of all the opposition?

Partisan politics is part of the answer. If President Bush had made similar proposals for improving our health care system, probably 50 percent of the people riled up against it now would have gone along. Our country is so partisan that millions of citizens will now systematically reject anything suggested by the other "tribe."

Rarely are opportunities to launch a political attack missed. Thwarting reform, as some conservatives have hypothesized, could be President Obama's political destruction.

In this "no holds barred" atmosphere, too many politicians have tossed any pretense of honesty to the curb. Exhibit one is Sarah Palin with her false accusation of "death panels."

The only health care death panels we need to be concerned with are those already in existence at health insurance companies, deciding what drugs, people and procedures are covered.

Conservative media plays another significant role with their agenda of destroying anything they perceive as liberal. Instead of listening to real experts or reading professional articles, too many Americans are now tuning in Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or other such shows, and pretending they're listening to actually news and analyses.

What exactly is their complaint with liberalism anyway? Is it the movements for civil and women's rights? Perhaps Hannity and Beck are upset with the American Revolution, our Constitution, Social Security, Medicare, economic regulations that have staved off depressions, or with the extension of rights to white males of moderate income? These all were liberal causes for their day.

Our health care debate reveals a lack of compassion in America, and we suffer because of it. We use prisons to warehouse fellow citizens who are mentally ill, we allow much higher rates of poverty than in other advanced countries, we often turn our backs on those less fortunately.

We are not nurturing enough of our own people. This results in our social problems being roughly five times higher than those of other industrialized nations. So what if 45,000 Americans die every year. If Rush says yelling like a 3-year-old at a town hall meeting is the right thing to do, or if you don't like the color of the president's skin, or if health care reform rubs your economic ideology the wrong way, or if it's a great opportunity to "waterloo" a Democratic president, then so be it.

Nations with a higher quality of life than our own are characterized by greater compassion for their people.

We can do better.

* Mark Mansperger is an assistant professor of anthropology and world civilizations at Washington State University Tri-Cities. His research includes cultural ecology, development and international economics.

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