By Barry Gan
St. Bonaventure, NY – The right is angry with Obama. They think he's a socialist. The left is angry with Obama. They think he's a turncoat. But he's neither a turncoat nor a socialist. He is what a little more than half of the voters bargained for, and he's what this nation deserves.
In the first place, Obama is no socialist. He has agreed to what has been termed an overhaul of our health care program, and the right-wing pundits have been hard at work calling it a socialist program. Little could be further from the truth. The bill that is emerging from a Democratic Congress is an insurance care program, not a health care program. It guarantees, at taxpayer expense, forty million more clients for insurance companies.
And will we get better health care, or more health care, as a result? No. The bill does not add anything to the actual health care system no more doctors, no more hospitals. We'll get a larger bureaucracy, where doctors have to ask insurance companies if they can have permission to treat a patient and where insurance companies can tell patients that they will not be covered. This is what we call health care in the U.S. The insurance companies will continue to rake in obscene profits, complaining all the while about government interference, which just provided them with forty million more customers.
The Republicans and other right-wingers oppose this. Why? Not because it isn't health care but because, they say, it is too costly! This from a party that has supported two wars and a military budget that total seven trillion dollars over the past ten years! This from a party that sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths tens of thousands more injured, physically and psychologically, for life. Talk about getting priorities backwards!
The left-wingers in the country are upset with Obama, too. They claim he was elected on an anti-war platform. Not true. He campaigned to wind down the war in Iraq quickly and to build up the war in Afghanistan. He was quite explicit about both, and that is what he has done.
As a result we now have a President who wins the Nobel Peace Prize on a pro-war platform, aims to spend trillions on war AND on insurance companies, and is able to avoid criticism from allegedly progressive elements in the country because he is black.
What this country needs is no war, expanded health care without an insurance bureaucracy, and a President who is less a so-called pragmatic realist and more a principled idealist. But we won't get such a President because we as a nation have convinced ourselves that such things are neither possible nor desirable.
We have the power but lack the vision. We have the ability but lack the will. We will pay for our deficiencies dearly as we watch our country disintegrate.
Listener-Commentator Barry Gan is a professor of philosophy at St. Bonaventure University.
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