Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/health/page/17/)
About health and the struggle for universal health care.
“I don’t want this country to become another socialized country like Russia.” These were the words of a woman in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter. What is important to this woman? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?
We usually think of environmental justice when we refer to how the disadvantaged suffer from pollution and other toxic chemicals more than those of us belonging to the middle or upper classes: siting of waste facilities, home location near highways or poison-spewing factories are just some of those issues. But when I spoke with my sister Amy, she brought up another form of environmental inequality — lack of access to wilderness and nature. You could call this a form of nature-deficit disorder imposed by poverty and class, not by the decisions of middle-class parents or their kids. (You can see the third part of my talk with Amy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj8LIWpVw_0&feature=channel_page). This issue has interested me for a long time.
We have expressed our differences with the religious campaign for health care but I sure am glad these people are working at it. Today’s email from Kristin Williams at Faith in Public Life:
300,000 listened to our health care webcast with Obama; tens of thousands have taken action; and hundreds of clergy have preached about health care. TODAY, faith groups are demonstrating a new level of coordination: asking hundreds of thousands of their members to call their Senators and Reps to make the moral case for reform. Meanwhile, our TV ad featuring local faith leaders saturates key markets in six target states. Tomorrow, local faith leaders flood Congress with Hill visits and a noon rally.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about “nature-deficit disorder.” I guess this is a result of Richard Louv’s recent book Last Child in the Woods, where he coined this term to describe the human costs of alienation from nature. According to Louv, the proliferation of structured activities (homework and sports), fear of “stranger danger,” and video games keep children from playing outside in nature. Lots of these same young people can tell you all about the destruction of the Amazon rainforests and which species are endangered, but they don’t know much of anything about the bugs and birds in their own backyard. I agree with Louv when he says that children need time to bond with nature on their own terms, time to play without any necessary goal beyond following their curiosity.
On Tuesday in this post I was a little critical of an op-ed by John Kenneth White that argued that the real reason it’s proving so hard to get universal healthcare is that even fairly conservative white middle class people in the 1970s actually did think the New Deal and Medicare were for “us”, but now think universal health care will be for “them” (the undeserving poor, the nonwhite etc.). So they don’t support it. I felt that White presented this as an inevitability–that people will naturally follow their narrow “interests”–rather than a result of the way universal healthcare is being presented to them. (See Michael Lerner’s well argued take on what Obama could have done to present universal healthcare in the frame of “we’re all in this together.”)
Turns out he doesn’t think it inevitable, or at least not an insuperable problem in the long run. I sent John White the post and he responded:
In my latest book, Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era just published by the University of Michigan Press, I wrote that our present politics was one of discomfort–meaning that the demographic changes underway in the U.S. had made Americans uncomfortable about each other (thinking in broad racial and ethnic terms).
Thursday Night is Health Care Change Night and the Weekly D’Var Torah both explore the meaning of choosing life.
Media analyses of President Obama’s health care speech were divided on whether he had indicated serious support for a public option or had, instead, cleverly tossed a bone of “recognition” to the progressives while simultaneously demanding that they drop their insistence that the health care reform undercut insurance company profits. The confusion, for once, is not with the media but with the incoherence of a centrist politics. Obama wishes to relieve the suffering of Americans, but he does not wish to challenge the profit-uber-alles old “Bottom Line” of the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately for him and for most Americans, he can’t have it both ways. FDR recognized that — and so was willing to stand up to the vested interests of the class from which he emerged, not only rhetorically, as Obama is willing to do at some rare moments like his Health Care speech, but in the actual policies he promoted.
One reason why so many people find it difficult to enthusiastically advocate for health care reform is that we still don’t know which bill and which proposals are being included and which not. The details matter. In How the PUBLIC OPTION Measures Up to “A Faith-Inspired Vision of Health Care.” (downloadable PDF, from Faithful Reform in Healthcare, and we also posted the text here), we find an assessment from a spiritual progressive perspective of some of the key elements in what a “public option” might look like as articulated in one of the bills with greatest support. It remains to be seen whether the actual health care bill that emerges from Congress will have this kind of a public option or not–because it is quite possible to imagine a “public option” remaining in the health care bill, but it being eviscerated even further than it has so far.
When I first heard about the Network of Spiritual Progressives back in 2005 one of the things that most impressed and pleased me was a document in which they laid out their agenda and on each point contrasted their view with the typical liberal and conservative views. Here’s one of them. Pretty succinct, I think:
5. We will seek a single-payer national health care plan and also broaden the public’s understanding of health care. Our physical health cannot be divorced from environmental, social, spiritual, and psychological realities – and the entire medical system has to be reshaped in light of that understanding to focus on prevention, encourage alternative forms of health practice along with traditional Western forms, and insist that because human beings have many levels of reality, health care must reflect that rather than seek to reduce the human to the merely material.
Regarding healthcare reform, we are having the wrong conversation. We are having a consumer protection, economic political conversation. We are not having the moral conversation. We have not determined the values and virtues that define us as a people.