by Vito de la Cruz

Politicians and profiteers who contribute to politicians use the phrase “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Most often they use it when they are in power and want to stay there. The quaint logic underlying the saying provides that if something functions there is no need for improvement. The question is, however, functions for whom?

Those who oppose health care reform argue that the current system works. They conjure up socialist ghosts, Nazis, and contradictory logic to whip up the public against a health system overhaul, even when such reform is sorely needed. These folks don’t understand political systems or logic. They understand fear and profits. They clearly bank on the rest of us being as easily hoodwinked as those who nod in blind agreement with “pundits” who declare President Obama to be Muslim, Kenyan, the new Hitler, and hater of all white men. In this, they are well versed. Distractions, after all, serve the status quo and profits. They also bet that Americans will knuckle under red hobgoblins just as before.

Affordable, quality health care isn’t a socialist pipe dream or a fascist goal. It’s a human right that most democracies (think all of Europe and Japan) and some non-democracies (Saudi Arabia) and emerging countries (Brazil, Bhutan and most of Latin America, to name a few) allied with America have provided for their citizens in myriad creative ways. America prides itself on providing ample freedoms, liberties and privileges. Yet, America does not provide 48 million citizens health care coverage other than emergency room triage and allows seventy-three percent of us to be at the mercy of for-profit insurance carriers and health care profiteers. America remains the only industrialized country without universal health care. Is this a system that works for all Americans or one that values illness-derived profits before humans?

Among the false myths such as “death panels, health care for illegal aliens, and government financed abortions,” circulates this other laugher—government-run health care is socialism and doesn’t work. Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, SCHIP and TriCare cover twenty-seven percent of us, mostly the poor, elderly, disabled, veterans, and children from low income families. These programs are funded and administered by the government. They have worked for decades. Lest the red-baiting naysayers forget, Harry Truman, never a socialist or a fascist (he presided over the defeat of true Nazis and utilized atomic devices against Japan), was the first person to sign up for Medicare. Why? Symbolically, of course. In 1946, Truman proposed universal health care and failed to deliver. Two decades later in 1965, America fought off the red-scare and deep-pocket tactics of profiteers and their political allies and President Johnson signed Medicare into law providing public health coverage for the elderly.

Sixty-four years after ‘Give ‘em hell’ Harry’s proposal failed, the battle over universal health care continues. The medical and insurance complexes that profit from human illness have dipped into their overflowing pockets, dusted off their red-scare rhetoric, and lined up their politicos. They don’t mind if the debate goes on for another generation or two. They profit by it. But if we don’t overhaul our health system now, it is we who will be broken and we will have only ourselves to blame.