Time to Make a Difference, Mr. President

When it comes to the issues, no-one is better informed or more willing to find common ground than the president. But there’s a yawning chasm between government’s duty to deal with the country’s macro-economic condition and its obligation to address the plight of ordinary Americans at a time of financial peril.

It is hard to sell bailouts for banks and industries to voters struggling with foreclosure, inadequate health care and limited job opportunities. Especially infuriating, large salaries and bonuses are still shamelessly the order of the day at financial institutions that continue to operate at the limits of responsible business procedures. It is often said, taxpayers have assumed all the risk while companies gobble up the profits.

Even in those instances where funds have been returned, public discomfort with the effrontery of the whole process is palpable and the lasting perception is that they’ve been had. How much is a bank or insurance executive worth on the open market? And how much should someone in those positions pocket on their way out the door, regardless of the job they’ve done, while millions of their fellow citizens stand on unemployment lines? People, who’ve been out of work for months, even years, question whether their elected representatives are really working towards solutions or just serving the interests of privileged supporters who in turn keep them in office to do their bidding.

There’s something almost surreal about the debates in Congress and among television pundits. They are often filled with concerns about the cost, for example, of providing health care for everyone, and about philosophical differences between parties and ideologues. Socialism, conservatives shriek at every attempt to reform health-care. It doesn’t seem to matter that trying to find a more equitable means of delivering medical care has nothing to do with changing our political system. It’s just ready shorthand partisans use to denigrate anything the least bit progressive as a threat to “free markets”, even if that term spells disaster for sick, soon-to-be impoverished members of society. Still one continues to hear the dull-witted claim George Bush made that no-one in this country is denied care since they are able to access emergency rooms.

In a recent interview, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, physician and Harvard Professor, said health care should be considered a public service, “not a commodity” citing a 2007 study that showed the devastating consequences of the way health-care provisions often work. Sadly, it isn’t only the uninsured who fall into debt and bankruptcy; people with jobs and policies may find their coverage inadequate, undercut by limits and exclusions. That’s when they turn to credit cards and loans and find themselves in deep financial trouble. In other countries medical expense that leads to bankruptcy is virtually unknown. Here, however, lobbyists often write legislation regulating the credit card industry and defining bankruptcy parameters. The rationale for this has never been justified - - just one of the more egregious shortcomings of a political process that fails to serve the public interest.

Today, health-care reform is bogged down in bickering over how to pay for changes in the system. The ludicrous presumption that true reform would be too expensive and that a public option would offer an unfair advantage over private insurers ignores the enormous expense the country has shouldered in fighting two wars and paying off big pharma and the insurance industry to get them to participate in medical benefit plans. The next big idea is that a new raft of prospects would be forced to buy insurance or face fines in order to broaden the risk pool for insurance companies.

But without a public option and other protective provisions, private insurers would have a new source of revenue while consumers would have no way of combating high rates from price-fixing companies protected by the exclusion of anti-trust regulations in their industry. In Michael Moore’s latest film “Capitalism, A Love Story,” he shows up at a bank with a large bag to request the return of the people’s money. If current legislation working its way through Congress survives, it would, provide quite another vision in which huge bags of money are deposited at the door of big insurers.

It’s all well and good to seek accommodation among conflicting factions, but really it’s time, Mr. President, to stop making deals and start making the difference for which so many of us voted.