After listening to the health care Summit for about three hours, I came away with a sense that the health care issue is merely a metaphor for an ideological and political frame of mind.
After listening to the health care Summit for about three hours, I came away with a sense that the health care issue is merely a metaphor for an ideological and political frame of mind. To either side it doesn’t really matter about the details. It doesn’t matter about the cost. It doesn’t matter what kind of deal making goes on. It doesn’t even matter whether or not insurance companies benefit or lose their impact. This conflict is a battle of ideas for the long term path that America will follow in the twenty first century and beyond.
Since the founding of this country we have grown from a population of five million mostly rural inhabitants with the largest city, New York, having a population of 34,000. The largest five cities combined had a population of around 100,000. The geographical area of the United States was quite small with 16 states in 1800 and didn’t extend much farther west than the Mississippi River. People had a lot of space and fending for oneself and living off the land working twelve to fifteen hour days was the rule rather than the exception. Rugged individualism was accepted and lauded. The strong prospered and the weak fell by the wayside. Nobody helped and few people cared. Life was hard and dangerous with very little time for fun and diversion. Government played a very small role in the lives of the people and businesses flourished with very little government interference. This is the paradigm for the Republicans and conservatives and a Utopia that they would like to come as close as possible duplicating. It is an impossible dream and here’s why:
The country now has nearly three hundred million people, double the population of the United States when I was growing up in the late forties and early fifties. New York has about nine million people and is nearly double the population of the entire United Sates in 1800. The top five cities have nearly twenty million people. Even Peoria, which was kind of a symbol for small town middle America during the Nixon administration, has nearly 375,000 people. The percentage of people living in urban areas is between 60% and 80% depending on how one defines urban. Only about 6% to 10% are classified as rural inhabitants. There are 52 states which spread from coast to coast and beyond. People work forty hour weeks and are paid pretty well compared to the rest of the world. People don’t live off the land. They don’t forage for food. Everything is provided for them for a price. They have police and fire protection and government is a constant companion in their lives. There are hundreds of alphabet agencies both state and federal that oversee every aspect of our lives and make regulations to improve the quality and safety of thousands of products services and protect our investments. Just in the last century we enacted the income tax, social security, civil rights legislation, Medicare and Medicaid. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have grown the size of government in a slow but inevitable march toward something that we do not like to admit and many, mostly Republicans, that think that this march toward socialism will spell the end of our democracy and the end of America as a great power. They may be right and they may be wrong but that doesn’t make any difference because we cannot stop this phenomenon even if we wanted to. Only a revolution could affect such a change.
We are a capitalist country migrating toward socialism because we have discovered over the centuries that unbridled and unchecked capitalism is not the most effective and efficient economic model. A mixture of Capitalism, government regulation and oversight (government interference) in the proper balance seems to work well for us despite the economic difficulties that we are encountering at the present time.
It is ironic that, at the same time, China is a socialist country (Communist) that is moving toward capitalism because they find that their economic and political model is not truly adequate to compete in the global economy. They have made reforms and modifications to their economy and permit limited private ownership of businesses. They have learned from the Soviet collapse that a total transformation will not work, however pursuing the communist model also will not work.
Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years our two countries will meet in the middle. Many things can happen between now and then, but it is possible China and the United States could be the two great super powers in the world with a similar socio-economic model.
Anyway the above scribbling is what I took away from that health care summit; the United States at a crossroads and two sides so ideologically opposite and entrenched that they could never come together – at least on that one issue. The Republicans may very well win this battle but they can’t win the war. That is preordained.