Time for Universal Care

Very few people in the United States remember the Great Depression.
And to our discredit, we don't spend much media time hearing from those
seniors. Most of us have to learn the details from history books or
even novels on the subject.

Put "The Grapes of Wrath" back on
your reading list. Even if you read it back in high school, you'll find
it eerily poignant reading it again. Especially the early chapters
where Steinbeck goes into great detail discussing the powerful banks,
how much more important they are than people and how much sway they
have over government officials.

Oddly enough, most of the scary
conditions in the book already were in place before our own great
depression hit this past fall. Millions homeless, hundreds of thousands
of them our military veterans, people dying for want of medical
attention, smart kids unable to pursue an education because the price
tag has outstripped their earning potential: we've got it all.

The
one remarkable thing about our times is that our economic collapse may
have brought us to the tipping point. Our society and our individual
consciences have long tolerated a certain amount of tragedy when it
happens to somebody else. But now that the rest of us - from fat cats
to the middle class - are losing wealth, homes and health insurance, it
appears that everyone is headed for the Dumpster. Consequently, our
economy, our society and our government are finally prepared to make
corrective changes, hoping to avoid universal calamity.

Perhaps you watched the president's speech from Elkhart, Ind., on Feb. 9.

I
have to watch; it's my job. And anyway, it's like a car wreck - except
that this mess we're in right now was no accident. We picked a fight
halfway around the world, hired no-bid contractors with money we
borrowed from often unfriendly foreign countries and removed the
safeguards from our financial system. All so we could lull ourselves
into believing that we would become a more flourishing and robust
nation by doing so.

With unrighteous hands we cracked the whip
on "terrorism" and now the lash has recoiled and struck us in the back.
And that backlash hurts.

The president told us that 598,000
U.S. jobs were lost in January. All these newly unemployed workers
won't create homelessness or food insecurity or health care shortages
in the U.S. They'll just swell the ranks of the millions already
experiencing those nightmares.

That's when the tipping point appears. And it's the tipping point that the folks in charge want to avoid, no matter what.

So
the president stood in Elkhart and enumerated the many ways the
stimulus money would stave off further cataclysm, including millions
and millions of dollars to pay COBRA bridge health insurance premiums
for the workers who recently lost their jobs.

U.S. taxpayers,
many of them from the same pool as the nearly 50 million Americans
currently without health insurance, will be borrowing money from their
grandchildren - after first indebting them to China - to pay insurance
premiums.

And it's not because a half-million more people
without health insurance matter one fig when put up against 100 times
that many who already live in fear of illness or injury.

And it's
not that the insurance companies and drug companies and all the rest of
the for-profit medical establishment don't want to lose the revenue the
recently laid-off generated as workers.

And it's not even that
insurance companies who sell COBRA make so many campaign contributions
that they can pretty much tell Congress what to do.

No, it's
because our bloated, costly exclusionary and at times deadly health
care financing system is teetering at the brink and may tip over.

It's
because this year, as he has for many years, Michigan Rep. John Conyers
has introduced HR 676, which already has garnered nearly 50 co-sponsors
- a bill that restructures our health care system much like the rest of
the civilized world and guarantees health care for all Americans.

And
it's because poll after poll, like the October 2008 ABC News poll,
shows that two-thirds of Americans support changing our current system
to a universal system.

Call Congress and the White House. Tell them to pass HR 676. The tipping point has come.