"UNAMERICAN"

The front page of yesterday's New York Times carried two pictures of demonstrators with placards. The one on top read "Protect Women's Health." The one below announced that "ObamaCare is UnAmerican." Okay, I can see the part about protecting women's health: that seems like an unobjectionable objective, and one on which we could all, surely, agree--though I suppose some might question whether women's health is at risk. The quibble might be, Why not protect everybody's health?

"ObamaCare is UnAmerican" is another matter, and prompts the question, What could be UnAmerican about seeking to provide health care for those millions of our citizens who have not, until now, enjoyed its benefits? Many of them, indeed, have been specifically excluded from receiving benefits or protection by insurance companies whose interest is exclusively in their bottom line. Many more have been excluded by their inability to afford insurance and by the failure of their employer to provide it for them. Is it UnAmerican to ensure that not the least of us goes unprotected from medical and financial disaster? And not least in consideration of the fact that we all we end up paying for such events anyway, and usually when they have become more troublesome and infinitely more expensive to deal with. Is it UnAmerican to have minimal foresight, even enlightened self-interest at heart?

The placard also prompts a second question: If this is UnAmerican, what, then, is the American approach to health care? Neglect? The free market? One or the other of these. Neglect brings with it all too obvious consequences, including those above: postponement leads only to graver medical problems, the kind that can be addressed only by expensive emergency or acute care--unless we choose simply to let people die, an alternative roundly applauded, as I recall, in one of the Republican debates.

The free market, then; this is the American way. A free market in which insurance companies add their overhead costs to the prospect of already escalating medical expenses and in which, in order to serve their bottom line, they are free to refuse coverage to anyone they choose. In which millions of Americans (the less financially secure, the poor, the unemployed, these, too, are Americans) are left to fend for themselves. In which millions of Americans are constrained, for financial reasons alone, to postpone health care until it becomes a life-threatening emergency, and to deny themselves the benefits of cost-saving preventive care. Is it "American" to be callous about one's fellow citizens? To insist on the more expensive alternative for reasons of pure ideology? Is it American to be so un-smart, so readily submissive to those whose primary purpose is not to provide for their health and welfare, but to make money?

The "UnAmerican" epithet is a weapon most frequently--I might even say exclusively--by partisans on the right. Do lefties resort to calling those who disagree with them "UnAmerican"? Did anyone on the left--no matter how much they may have disliked George W. or disagreed with his policies--think to call him UnAmerican? I search my own conscience for having ever entertained such a thought, still less expressed it. I disagreed with virtually everything he said and did, but I never accused him of saying or doing it with the express intention of harming America. And yet that is what I hear from the right today--and not only from the crazies: I hear it from the mouths of their candidates for President, that Obama's express intention is to run this country into the ground.

I read Tom Friedman's op-ed column, also in yesterday's New York Times, about the political climate in Australia and New Zealand--countries where, it seems, even the right wing is Democratic and where, once debated and passed into law, legislation is not immediately subject to rancorous challenge or repeal. Where, it seems, some measure of sanity still rules. Whither America, I am compelled to wonder, when we are swayed this way and that by such forces of vindictiveness and unreason?