Reply #11: y'all make me proud [View All]

[iverglas]

The support for (and understanding of) single public payer universal health care that I have watched grow over a few years of reading DU is the single most encouraging feature of the US political landscape, to this outside onlooker.

We Canadians here would of course be pleased to think we'd contributed to this phenomenon. ;)

Something to remember: universal health care was an early cause adopted by the precursor to today's New Democratic Party in Canada, and the cornerstone (along with public old age pensions) of the social safety net that the party championed and prodded government parties into implementing over the decades.

One of the party's first national leaders, Tommy Douglas, brought the first public health care plan to North America when he was premier of Saskatchewan -- starting in 1944 with medical care for pensioners, then $5/year hospitalization coverage for everyone in 1947, and finally:

http://www.saskndp.com/history/douglas.html

In 1959, twelve years later, when the province's finances seemed to him to be strong enough, Douglas announced the coming of the medicare plan. It would be universal, pre-paid, publicly administered, provide high quality care, including preventive care, and be accepted by both providers and receivers of the medical service.

"The father of Canadian medicare" is what he's remembered as -- not nearly as many people know that he's the grandfather of Kiefer Sutherland -- and why he was voted The Greatest Canadian in 2004.
http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/

Unfortunately, the NDP has achieved many things, but never national government.

The Democratic Party in the US is starting from a different place, though. It is one of the two established parties, not a third party trying to break onto the scene as the NDP was back in that day. (And the Republicans are really hardly likely to co-opt this plan out from under the party that campaigns for it, as the Liberals are famous for doing with NDP policies.)

People can be confounded and misled by the corporate interests that control health care delivery. But it is one issue that affects virtually everyone in a society, certainly all working people in the US, whether middle-class or minimum-wage, who are one lay-off away from losing their coverage. It is an issue that everyone feels on a gut level, all their lives.

It is therefore an opportunity for a political party that does genuinely care about their interests to demonstrate that, by proposing -- and doing the hard work to explain and defend -- a universal health plan. And hard work it will be, in the face of all the money and all the lies that will be poured into defeating it.

But people get it, in their guts, and the party that truly gets that and demonstrates that it gives a damn about them by fighting for what they need is a party that is going to win a lot of votes and loyalty.

And once a society does have universal health care, it is a society in which everyone just has a little more stake in the welfare of everyone else, and a little more commitment to the programs and policies that work for the welfare of everyone, and maybe a little more trust in the public institutions that are doing something to earn it for a change, and just think what could happen when that starts. It's a transformative moment -- but it does call for, and is part of, a transformative process.

Back in the early 80s I picked up a hitchhiker in Tennessee, an unemployed housepainter who was travelling north to see his sick mother. He wasn't a person with a passport. After admiring my multi-coloured currency, he asked, thoughtfully, "what's it like up there? are you free to go anywhere you want?" Well, I said, it's pretty much like it is down here. Except we have free health care.

Aaaaaah, he said.

People do get it.