The Canary In The Mine Is Health Care

What happens to health care will be the dress rehearsal for what happens to the rest of it. The Obama proposal is anything but radical, and even it will have enormous opposition. As the mullahs in Iran discovered, the people do not have unlimited patience. When you foreclose, dispossess, bankrupt, and destroy enough of them, the remainder will erupt. So far, our repair of the Great Financial Crisis has not apparently done much other than recuperate the groups that created the mess. The Big Banks are on their feet, but they are finding they can't loan money, because nobody wants to stick their entrepreneurial necks out. There are plenty of General Hallecks and McClellans; there as yet are no U.S. Grants, no Shermans, no Stonewall Jacksons, no Lees. The only thing that matters is the welfare of the human beings in a country; ideology and political philosophy are meaningless charades. The measure of a country is the well being of the people under its power. Our stewardship will be reviewed by how many we killed, how many we let suffer, how many we left in despair. Did our paltry hedonism outweigh the hearts of those who suffered? Did our vaunted accomplishments and our posturings outweigh our comparably large failures? If we cannot provide care for the population of the USA, if we cannot establish a system in which people may receive care without being bankrupted, we shall see the country go the same way into bankruptcy: a real, physical bankruptcy following hard upon the heels of the spiritual and symbolic bankruptcy.