Yet again, our media and politicians have fixated on a meaningless sound-bite as a way of marginalizing health-care as an important debate in this country. Two words, shouted by Republican Rep. Joe Wilson at President Obama during a speech to a joint session of congress, have become a touchstone in the national fight over healthcare: “You lie.” The outburst was sparked by Obama’s affirmation that his reforms would not apply to illegal immigrants. Wilson, who appeared to disagree with this, voiced his opinion and has taken over the news cycle for the past week. First he apologized to Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, and then he refused to apologize on the house floor, after which he was officially “disapproved of” in a resolution voted on by the House.
Of course, Wilson acted outside of congressional decorum and deserved the disapproval, but more important than that is the fact that his statement was wrong. There is nothing in any bill that suggests that illegal immigrants will receive healthcare. But there is a key piece of information that is missing in the debate over Wilson’s statement: Obama could not have lied because Obama himself has not released anything that even looks like a comprehensive plan for healthcare reform. Put simply, Obama couldn’t have lied about his plan because there is no plan.
More than anything else, this incident shows how useless our media and politicians- yes, that includes the President- are when it comes to dealing with the issue of healthcare reform. Obama, who up until recently openly supported a so-called public option (a weak step towards true reform at best), has now said that even though he likes the idea, he could live without it, and thus has officially disenfranchised the millions of American citizens and residents who do not have healthcare.
The fact that Wilson would get so riled up over the idea that illegal immigrants would receive healthcare is itself endemic of the many problems with politicians and the media in this country. Who cares whether or not illegal immigrants can receive affordable healthcare? Illegal immigrants are, in many ways, part of the backbone of our economy, and, more than ever, they file and pay their taxes (see article at Boston.com).
The healthcare debate, like any debate in this country apparently, is fueled more by greed than anything else. Greed from politicians who are afraid of losing campaign contributions, greed from senior citizens who are afraid of losing their Medicare benefits, and greed from healthcare companies afraid of losing their market share to the government. These three entities alone are powerful enough to keep the idea of a single payer system (a system in which the government funds healthcare for everyone, as they have in Canada, England, France, or any other wealthy western nation other than our own) out of the debate entirely. The closest we’ve nudged toward a system in which our residents are no longer afraid from bankrupting medical bills is in Obama’s “public option,” which is basically off the table and which would have barely covered anyone anyway.
Why are we even arguing about this? Studies show definitively that Americans are in support of healthcare reform, and even more evidence suggests that people in countries with single payer systems are considerably happier with their healthcare than those in the United States. The only way to keep the current system in place is by lying, which our political class seems to be getting less and less capable at.
The entire debate has been plagued by misinformation. A recent critique of single-payer healthcare by the conservative Investor’s Business Daily suggested that under the UK’s National Health Service scientist Stephen Hawking, who has a debilitating chronic disease, would have died before he could make his discovering without any sort of fact checking. Turns out that Hawking not only teaches at University of Cambridge in England, but also that he is a British citizen who was born in England.
The only benefactors of the current system are the insurance industry and people being given money by the insurance industry. These people include both Rep. Joe Wilson and President Barack Obama. The people who are going to be hit hardest when healthcare reform is eventually gutted are those who are uninsured. Those people include not only the impoverished but also people who run or work for small businesses, and artists/freelancers who do not receive healthcare through employment. Those people, of course, include recent music school graduates.
