Bringing it all back home

The budget crunch for states is starting to hit home. But of course, those who get hit first are those least able to defend themselves. In an December 31 editorial, the New York Times refers to

[a]n ominous new study [that] shows that up to 1.6 million impoverished and working-poor Americans - at least a third of them children - have been deliberately knocked from publicly financed health care programs in the last two years. Officials in 34 states are opting to slash Medicaid and poor children's health insurance coverage as a path of least resistance to the balanced budgets mandated by law.

States have raised poverty standards beyond federal requirements, increased bureaucratic delays and even shut down children's health programs entirely to keep entitled poor people off the rolls.

Well, the lazy, unproductive good for nothings should have known better that to get sick in the first place. After all, you can't expect the rest of us to actually, well, care, can you? That would mean taxes! And what's more, it would mean taxes on the middle class because taxing the rich is class warfare and everybody is against that!

If I sound bitter, maybe I am. It was in 1982, if I recall, when as an independent candidate for Congress I participated in a candidates' night at a local college. The only other one to show up was the Libertarian. A question arose about health care and I said I supported a national health care system. My fellow candidate sneered "And who's going to pay for this?" I answered, "I am. I'm prepared to pay my fair share in taxes to see to it that no one lacks for a basic human need like health care. And I think everyone else should be willing to do the same."

At the time, the remark seemed surprising coming from a candidate for public office. Now, all too often in all too many places, it would seem outlandish coming from anyone. For all the pontificating the rightists do about "traditional values," it is they more than anyone else who have successfully disrupted the idea that we are not only accountable to but responsible for our neighbors. With their paeans to the glories of self-interest, their demonization of the poor, their celebration of "me first" as a positively spiritual path, they have to a depressing degree succeeded in making "I'm all right, Jack" both an individual and a social credo.

I reject that credo. I maintain, against all the cold-blooded "reason" to which the unreasoning hacks of reaction lay claim, that we are responsible for more than just our own private part of the universe. That "family" means more than Mon-Dad-2.4 kids, that it is an extended family, an extended family that reaches even beyond ties of the blood to embrace ties of the heart, ties that reach to friends, to community, and even to the community of humankind. That by virtue of our common humanity, we share a common responsibility, one to the other, a common responsibility for health care, for housing, for food, for the things that make life possible; for education, for the opportunity for personal growth, for experience, for political and personal freedom, for the things that make life worth living.

The answer to Cain's question is "Yes."

Footnote: The Times adds that

[t]hings would be even worse except for the $20 billion in state emergency aid that the Republican-led Congress was embarrassed into approving at the height of the tax-cut frenzy this year. Since Congress is showing no signs of picking up the slack when it comes to health coverage, it should vote at least a renewal of this aid next year.

At least.