Robert L. Terrell

Much depends on the outcome of the extraordinary struggle underway in Washington. D.C. over the Obama administration’s muddled effort to establish a system of health care that includes all U.S. citizens. As a result, the outcome of this particular struggle will almost certainly shape the nation’s social agenda for the next generation.  If the administration succeeds, the expansive dreams of social progress that propelled Barack Obama into the White House will be authenticated in ways that will substantially improve the lives of tens of millions of citizens. Moreover, many millions of us will live longer, healthier, and more productive lives than will ever be possible under the current health care system.

With the passage of time, this fundamentally important transformation would inevitably contribute substantially to the United States becoming a more thoughtful and humane nation. The domestic and global results of such a transformation would be a blessing for humankind in every section of the globe.  People around the world immediately recognized this possibility when Obama was elected. This is one of the primary reasons why his victory was wildly cheered by joyous multitudes in many nations.

Nonetheless, if the forces of resistance win more than they lose in the current struggle over health care reform, much of the current optimism which exists in the nation regarding the possibilities of enacting meaningful, progressive reforms will be substantially extinguished for much of the next generation, if not longer. Given the high stakes involved, it should not surprise that those who oppose health care reform are waging a more vigorous fight than the one waged by a similarly constructed coalition during the recent presidential campaign.

Even though health care reform enjoys broad support across the nation, the opposition is spending expending extensive resources in its effort to create the impression that most people don’t want it. In addition, opponents of health care reform are spending many millions of dollars in order to build resistance to the proposals currently being negotiated in Congress.

I am particularly struck by the disturbingly large number of health care reform opponents who have recently been showing up at town hall meetings armed with pistols and military-type assault weapons. Many aspects of their highly choreographed performances remind me of the scantily clad Malaysia warriors one occasionally sees striding incongruously along the streets of East African cities.  The warriors are commonly armed with glistening machetes and menacing, five-foot long spears. They are striking figures, and people provide them wide berths as they stride along, exuding confidence, pride, and an aura of potential danger.

Nonetheless, everyone knows, including the unarmed, thoroughly urbanized city dwellers witnessing the comings and goings of the Massai warriors, that they do not constitute a threat to the established socio-economic order. This is primarily due to the fact that machetes and spears have little utility in the domesticated corridors of urbanized corporate and political power where Africa’s future is being forged.

A similar truth pertains to the eclectic assortment of gunslingers recently showing up for the television cameras outside town hall meetings focused on health care reform. The gunslingers, who are garnering lots of attention, will eventually prove to be inconsequential to the health care debate’s outcome. Like the Massai warriors who stroll the streets of Nairobi and Mombasa, their weapons are best suited for environments far removed from the arenas wherein the fate of matters such as national health care will be determined.  My enduring hope is that the gunslingers are only attempting to make a symbolic point about their alleged right to bear arms while attending nonviolent public meetings with high-ranking government officials. Assuming the best, they will eventually come to understand that each of them needs good, affordable health care just as much as each of us.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for those who are leading the fight against health care reform. They include spokespersons for insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and a disreputable coalition of running dog accomplices associated with the two dominant political parties.
Their claim to the contrary notwithstanding, these people are essentially reactionary mouthpieces for those who profit from the current system. They represent vested interested interests that have exercised virtually unchallenged power in this nation for generations. And they will need to be dislodged if the best health care interests of the largest number of citizens are to be accommodated properly.

Make no mistake about it. This incredibly powerful coalition is committed to the maintenance of a criminally unbalanced status quo that consigns millions to unnecessary pain, suffering and premature death. Moreover, there is a real chance that they will prevail yet again in their effort to thwart the nation’s best interests through the use of copious threats, poisonous rhetoric, fantastic lies, clever evasions and dirty tricks of the sort employed in the mass media by clever, unprincipled, avatars of division and oppression.

Faced with this very real threat, people of goodwill need to gird themselves for a long hard fight that will inevitably include episodes of failure, and periods of doubt and confusion. Through it all, progressives need to remain cognizant of the fact that we have the right to create a society, which provides adequate, affordable health care for each of us. Given the fact that our current health care system is bankrupting us, we must never lose sight of the fact that we literally can’t afford to fail.

Most important, progressive individuals, groups and organizations need to use the current health care reform struggle to build a national movement dedicated to the elimination of each of our most important social problems. This long neglected work is important, not only because of the critical necessity of relieving unnecessary deprivation and suffering, but because it is needed to establish the social and economic foundations necessary for the nation to competently function in the decades immediately ahead.  In other words, the United States no longer has the luxury of permitting huge swaths of its population to subsist in deprived circumstances, bereft of minimally adequate health care.

Finally, progressive participants in the health care reform struggle need to transform the nature of the debate. Cost is not the issue. Any nation that can afford 6,000 foreign military bases, and two wars fought simultaneously, can afford the cost of health care for each of its citizens. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is being hammered by specious allegations that their health care reform plans are too expensive.  Without completely ignoring the matter of costs, the administration would be well advised to shift the terms of debate. The discussion needs to center on Human Rights, and administration spokespersons should be making the point, as often as possible, that providing adequate, affordable health care is a legal necessity.  The concept that health care is a right is easy to understand, and it provides a clear, unambiguous point for rallying the broadest possible level of public support for the most comprehensive, public option proposals currently being discussed.

In any event, taking into consideration the tattered, dated, sorely neglected condition of much of the nation’s socio-economic terrain, it is clearly apparent that even if progressive forces win the health care struggle currently underway in the nation’s Capitol, much work will remain to be done. For example, we also need to enact major reforms pertinent to labor rights, unemployment, education, housing, homelessness, equal opportunity, nutrition, climate change, the so-called prison industrial complex, and foreign affairs.

In addition, our top priorities list needs to emphasize the urgent necessity of ending U.S. military participation in Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible. For the time being, let’s do what we can to ensure that our government commits to supporting our right to receive adequate, affordable health care.
In keeping with the egalitarian spirit of affirmative, mutual support that should inspire the unified national system we seek, I recommend that citizens, each and every one of them, be provided the same coverage provided the highest ranking members of the United States Government
Passage of a health care reform package committed to this end, would provide a game changing, conceptual template for transforming our society. That’s because such a wonderful, audacious commitment on the part of government would almost certainly engender correspondingly creative responses throughout society.

Government actually serving the people in such a fundamentally positive way would also engender a level of trust and respect that would make it possible to enact the reforms—at every level of government–that so many of us so desperately need.