Toward Medicare for All

Ever since that darkest year of 2001 it's been clear to me that the reason that the GWBush administrations could not in any way go on to excuse the infamy through which they were twice allowed to occupy the Oval Office is that, being naturally evil people with consequently misguided intentions, their policies had one overriding basis that led to their fouling everything they touched, almost without exception. That basis was to think of what a Clinton-type administration might do in each situation and so to see the exactly opposite direction as always being the best way to go.

I guess that, while always trying to keep up the spirit of moderation, the Obamarites would try to be consistent by not following that policy either. Still, in that light I have a few trepidations about what the incoming Obama administration is likely to do. They might keep the pendulum from swinging back far enough in the other and much preferred direction and in so doing challenging Newton's Third Law of Motion.

True, Obama's teams will include a lot of former Clinton people, including the former First Lady herself. But the general tenor of things doesn't as yet signal as much in the way of Change as B. Obama had spoken of during the campaign. Note for instance keeping in their positions of power people like Bush's Secretary of War, R. Gates, and J. Lieberman, the wishy-washy so-called Independent senator from Conn.

Probably the most crucial area in which this slowness to Change threatens to occur figures to be in health care.

The choice there seems obvious, and it definitely would be Change bigtime. Single-payer -- or Medicare for All, as it would much better be called -- is the way to try now, while scrapping private health insurance. But B. Obama has signaled that he intends to go slow on this, by first asking the public what it would like to see.

But this is a public that stood still when the Clintons were so badly trashed for putting forward a more universal health care system during their first years in office, while at around the same time Congress repealed a provision for catastrophic health insurance just a few months after passing it, when people who largely already had such coverage protested bitterly and loudly at allowing others to have the same protection -- showing that the Haves in this country are not very charitable to the Have-Nots, and, since the Haves are still very much in the picture, in the days ahead they will most likely work hard to keep things that way.

Steve Bates' "Yellow Doggerel Democrat" weblog and Andante's "Collective Sigh" have been giving especially vivid testimonies lately of the trials and tribulations faced by people trying to recover their health while at the mercy of a privately insured system that at times seems actually designed to work against that, by causing additional stresses and strains that can only worsen the afflicted's existing conditions.

This is the price that the less fortunate members of a society pay when a large segment of the population sees itself as having inherited the world, and from that position they see no point in allowing others to share in the general well-being, which first of all should always include good health and chances for a long and rewarding life. And in this case it doesn't help at all that those who have the power to make this decision and to change medical matters for the better are almost all Haves who are happy with things as they already are.