Time Has Come Today:

Why We Can’t Let The GOP Torpedo Health Care Reform

It was really quite eerie when we departed Buffalo, New York and crossed the international bridge into Canada a few weeks ago. Actually, it was really Fort Erie, but this is not a forum for arguing geographical semantics. So, back to our story.

As soon as we passed Checkpoint Charlie in the middle of the bridge and began driving by the squads of sullen, heavily armed Canadian military personnel positioned sporadically yet threateningly all along the ill-kept gravel roadways, we were immediately struck by the pervasive grayness of it all. And it wasn’t long before we started noticing the long, dreary lines of peasants trudging back towards their Gulags…defeated looking women in their ancient, weather-worn babushkas and overcoats; stooped-over men in their party worker caps, fraying jackets and trousers with patches over the patches; and unsmiling children with their gaunt faces and dull, lifeless eyes. The bread line was beckoning after yet another seemingly endless day of toil in the labor camps.

“NOT!”

As ridiculous as most of us know this scenario is…and it truly is ridiculous…it’s basically what the braying, lunatic fringe in the Republican Party wants us to believe. They will say or do anything in their efforts to torpedo any kind of meaningful Health Care reform in the United States, just like they said and did anything they could in their thankfully unsuccessful attempts to stop the advent of both Social Security and Medicare. So cries of “…government run health care is socialism”, and “socialism is just another word for communism”, echo around the halls of Congress and in Town Hall Meetings throughout the country.

Get real people. If you really believe that Canada…or England, or France, or any other country in the western world that is fortunate enough to have some sort of universal health care system…is therefore to be considered communist, as in ‘communist’ like the former Soviet Union was, then you need to give your head a shake! That kind of rhetoric is not only unadulterated b.s., it’s also insulting to all the countries being thusly pilloried by the jingoists who currently scream so loudly for the Republicans.

In spite of what you may have been hearing or reading, particularly with regards to Canada, our research these past few weeks has revealed that not one of the people we spoke to would ever consider trading their health care system for ours. Not a chance…whether in regards to quality, affordability, accessibility, comprehensiveness, fairness, or any other criteria you care to list. We have interviews to that effect, from which we’ll be sharing excerpts with you on this blog in the coming days.

But it wasn’t always thus with our neighbors north of the forty-eighth. It was a long, hard, bitter, and at times violent fight before universal health care became a reality in Canada in the mid-1960s. People died in the process. But ask them if they’d give it up now and they look at you as if you’ve lost your mind. Oh sure, there are some dissenters, but there’s no way Canadians as a whole will ever agree to go back to a system like the one they had before…like the one Americans have now!

The truth of the matter is that none of these other countries has a perfect health care system, although France comes admirably close. But they all have systems in place that are vastly superior and exponentially fairer and more inclusive than the one that we’re forced to deal with in the United States. And we’re not talking about the quality of health care here. Everyone knows that the quality of care available in this country is at least as good…not better, but at least as good…as it is anywhere. What we’re talking about are affordability and accessibility…and with reference to those criteria, the current health care system in the United States is sadly lacking.

There’s a reason the American Health Care system is ranked an embarrassing 37th in the world…37th for crying out loud, just behind 36th place Costa Rica and just ahead of 38th place Slovenia. Our system is broken, especially with regards to insurance, and it needs fixing before it sucks us all down into the same sewer in which the Republican anti-health care reform rhetoric is being spawned.

What we really need is a single payer system modeled after the best that all these other systems have to offer. Failing that…and it seems that the Democrats we elected last fall on the promise of meaningful health care reform have already folded their single payer hand…at the very least we need a public option to keep the conscienceless health insurance industry honest.

It’s surely apparent to everyone by now that the Republicans will never help in this effort. They have proven time and again that they can’t be trusted to bargain in good faith. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley has made that abundantly clear in the last few days. This piece of crap torpedoed the Senate Health Care Reform Committee negotiations and then bragged about it. That’s how they operate. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks (except for the people who contribute to their coffers).

Fortunately and finally, we now have someone on the Democratic side of the aisle who’s apparently ready to go to war on this issue. After President Obama seemed to indicate yesterday that he might now be willing to take the public option off the table as well, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner yelled “Enough”! Although he would prefer single payer, Weiner said in no uncertain terms that if a public option, at the very least, is not in the bill that the President eventually sends to the House, at least 100 House Democrats will not sign on.

That’s laying down the gauntlet…and good on him. It’s about damn time that someone stood tall on Health Care Reform. As long as the rest of the Democrats in the House and Senate are willing to stretch their backbones…and assuming they can convince the ‘Blue Dogs’ that it would be in their best interests to come along for the ride…the numbers say that we don’t need anyone else. So screw the Republicans, and the health insurance industry, and the health care lobby as a whole. The GOP were never going to be there anyway, so what’s the difference. We don’t need ‘em! It’s time to draw a line in the sand.

With apologies for taking a modicum of poetic license, Congressional democrats need to listen, and listen hard, to these prescient lyrics from the 1967 anthem “Time Has Come Today” by The Chambers Brothers…and they need to pay close attention to what they say. For indeed it is true.

“Time has come today. (Our) hearts should go their way. Can't put it off another day. I don't care what others say. They say we don't listen anyway. Time has come today.”

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

“Time has come today!”

SC