Responsibility, Government, and Health Care

The Biggest-Big-(Dumb)-Government "Conservative" in history (Defense spending! Deficit "management"!) will be proposing his health care "fix" in a few days at his first post-Katrina State of the Union. It amounts to making sure that upper-middle-class families (who already have more health coverage than, say, your average Wal-Mart employee) have enough money in tax-exempt accounts to guarantee they can afford their own healthcare costs, thereby putting "market pressure" on costs as a whole. That's fine, and the plan, if it actually works, might increase the number of people insured in this country ... some. But many people cannot afford such accounts, and there seems to be very little suggested for how to help those at the bottom. Let alone the problem that the plan is likely to be written by the same geniuses who forged Bush's prescription drug program. (That's right! Lobbyists! Can you hear the pitter-patter of thousands of little Abramoffs? Scuttling, scuttling...) Also, the program may amount to a big safety net for the Frist family business. HMO protections, exemptions, loopholes, etc., that will guarantee that those skyrocketing twice-the-rate-of-inflation healthcare costs continue to funnel into private coffers. Should the government be giving out more corporate welfare, especially in this sector? And then there's the question of whether it will actually do anything to improve the cost problem.

The Bush plan is far from a panacea, and it will likely amount to nothing but an meanspirited, wrong-headed, anti-government, anti-poor ideological experiment that will make Hillary's debacle of old at least look kind-hearted.

While only thematically related to health care, one thing that Hurricane Katrina taught us, hopefully, is that when government fails, terrible things can happen to the most vulnerable. The answer, faced with such possibilities, is not to get rid of government; the answer is to fix government, to make it address problems rather than whine and complain about the existence of problems. We must demand that we all, through government, do our best to provide for those amongst us who will be left with nothing, left powerless and undefended, while the rest of us are feeling very proud for "fending for ourselves" and keeping our own costs down, thanks to a different kind of government assistance.

Government will be involved in any potential heath care system, either because of what it does, what it fails to do, or what it neglects to do. We all have to decide what we're comfortable with, as citizens who have duties to our fellow citizens. President Bush has already made up his mind ... If that is the correct phrase.

Does anyone in this administration even remember how to spell "compassion"?