“Getting the Healthcare We Want”   August 6, 2017

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO 

Roger Ray, pastor          Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, p. 139

“…Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy – they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater – the rich essentially get what they want.”

      

Some of our listeners in Great Britain have lately been asking me to come back for another lecture tour. Our friend in the Progressive movement in the U.K., John Churcher, has been raising the same issue with me. I am flattered to be asked and I would love to go but there is a problem.

When I went in 2015, I had just published Progressive Faith and Practice which is a book about religion. I had a briefcase full of lectures that were as relevant in England as they were here. But my last book, Progressive Conversations, was a compilation of my ethics columns printed in the Springfield News-Leader. The topics addressed in those 100 essays were almost exclusively American problems. And the book we are working on now, America Will be Great When, will be even more specifically American.

Great Britain doesn’t have over-crowded prisons, a death penalty, or a radical rejection of immigrants. Europe is suffering from the income gap that is killing off the middle class in America. Iceland put corrupt bankers in prison rather than bailing them out and allowing them to reward themselves for wrecking the world’s economy with multi-million dollar bonuses. No other western democracy has anything like the gun problem that we have in the USA.  And, every western democracy is done with viewing illness as a business opportunity.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book speaks at length about the loss of democracy in America as capitalist interests continue to shift power away from the people in favor of corporations. The length and expense of our political campaigns turns the real power of government over to those who can make the largest contributions.

We do have a problem with gullible voters being persuaded to vote against their own best interests but we have a more frightening reality of a basic erosion of democracy that just allows moneyed interests to make decisions that serve themselves without even consulting voters.

There are three times as many pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capital Hill as there are members of Congress and the Senate. They ghost write ridiculous laws that prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate for better drug prices in spite of the fact that the US government is the largest single customer that big pharma has. You can buy American made pharmaceuticals in Canada or Mexico for a fraction of what we pay in the U.S. because their governments are not operated by corporations.

I appreciate our international listeners sticking with us but you can almost feel them gloating a bit. As much as you can find people who complain about their national health services in the U.K. or Canada, you have never seen any nation anywhere in the world that had universal healthcare that decided to scrap it and go to an insane system like ours with for profit insurance companies, hospitals, private practices, and inflated prescription drug prices.

Say what you will about the weaknesses or rationing of services elsewhere, no one looks at America and says, “We should do what they are doing.”

Our Healthcare industry is still nervously balanced on a precipice with a Congress that has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act more than 60 times and is now impotently wanting to actually repeal it now that they are indisputably in power but they just can’t agree on how deep to shove the knife into the heart of their voters.

We spend more on our healthcare in the USA than any other country and yet we leave millions out of the system entirely and a whole lot of us who are in it get very poor care and inexcusably bad outcomes. Conservatives publicly say that they don’t want the government in healthcare but they know, or at least they should know, that the government already pays for more than half of all of the healthcare in the country. Of course, most medical expenses occur near the end of life but when you add Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration together, you already have more than half of the country covered.

The plea for universal healthcare is not some impossible dream that is unattainable. The system is already in place and a mere change in the age requirements would cut our out of pocket healthcare expenses immediately. A whole lot of insurance executives would have to learn to live without billions in bonuses but we could do a canned food drive to keep them from starving in their beach home mansions.

As Bernie Sanders has says, the age of 65 for Medicare eligibility was not handed down from God. We could even stage it in over a period of a few years to give the system time to wean itself off its addiction to the money in your bank account.

A few months ago, Donald Trump was making excuses for why he had not been able to repeal and replace Obamacare on his first day in office as he had repeatedly promised to do. He said, “Who knew that healthcare was so complicated?” Well, in a way we all knew that but it is only complicated if you insist on protecting the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Once you can embrace the idea that has already been institutionalized in every other western democracy that illness is a problem to be solved and not an opportunity to exploit a person in the most vulnerable moment to clean out their bank account.

Look guys, I know that I often sound more like a political candidate giving a stump speech than I do a pastor delivering a sermon… these are dark days when you have to turn to the church to find a rational perspective on economics and public policy but that is where we live these days. But I do want to say a pastoral word to you today:

The oldest of the gospels in the New Testament is Mark. Mark starts off like a shot, with no flowery poetry and no embarrassing birth myths. Mark tells us that Jesus was baptized, called some disciples, and went straight to a synagogue to preach and the first thing he encountered, his first day to go to a church, was a demon.

I get that this is an ancient document with some seriously out of date assumptions but if we just let Mark tell his story, Jesus goes to this community church and a demon starts shouting. When I first seriously read that passage when I was in seminary, I wondered, how long had that demon been there before Jesus showed up? How many years had that demon been comfortably in attendance at worship services and no one ever noticed that it was a demon?

Folks, we get comfortable with the evil we know. I grew up in the segregated south. Monday through Friday, I went to a school with all white kids and it never even dawned on me that there was another school for black kids in my home town. I had never seen it. It was never mentioned. It was off in some neighborhood where we never went and I didn’t know anything about it.

I worked on the surrounding farm with black kids. I knew their names and so far as I knew, we were friends. It just never occurred to me that they were not in my school, not in my barber shop, and certainly not in my Sunday School classes. It was not until schools were integrated by the force of the Supreme Court that I had even known about the demon I had accepted for so many years.

You can say the same thing about indentured servanthood, slavery, child labor, human trafficking, and a host of other truly evil aspects of society. We live with homelessness, we accept that millions are uninsured, we let young lives go to waste for want of education because their parents can’t pay for it, and we are not evil people.

We never wanted Walmart to sell slave produced goods. We didn’t want our shoes to be made by children in S. Korea or our iPhones to be made by slaves in China. But we do want everyday discount prices, cheap shoes, and really neat new technology. We have just always lived in a world full of demons and we come to accept that they are part of the landscape. We tune out those who want to change the world because the world just is what it has always been.

The point of writing this book for thinking Americans and to make the rest of the world feel smug and self-righteous….the reason why I will be trying to get myself booked into as many pulpits around the country as I can over the next few months… if I may say it this way… is to cast out demons… and if not to cast them out, to at least reveal them for what they are.

Germany doesn’t have tuition free education because they are better people than we are. Brits don’t have universal health care because they are more compassionate than we are. The Nordic states do not have sane drug laws and restorative justice systems because they are more spiritual than we are. They just woke up to their demons before we did and now it is time for America to turn on the lights, open our eyes, and wake up.