Naturally, the reporters present interviewed and photographed that group "equally" with the supporters of health care inside. When I watched the news that night I wasn't surprised to see the event portrayed as a highly raucous and controversial event with the attendees evenly split between being pro and anti health care, and with people shouting "Socialist takeover" and "Give us Back America."
It was nothing of the sort. The people inside the auditorium were civil, polite, and thoughtful and raised legitimate questions about the nature of the bill before congress. Susan Davis answered the questions thoughtfully and intelligently and she got a large round of applause at the end of the session. None of that, of course makes for good television, so instead we got a highly skewered version of events emphasizing, as TV always does the confrontational and showy rather than the substantive and actual.
One thing, however, did seem striking to me about the comments made inside the meeting. Many of those who spoke, although they favored a major overhaul of the health care system, were concerned about the costs of the program and wondered whether "we" could afford to pay for it. It shouldn't surprise me (yet it always does) that when any social program that will benefit large numbers of people is proposed, the primary concern is almost always about costs. When an American general proposed last week that 48,000 more troops be sent to Afghanistan I heard nary a peep from citizens or commentators that we might not be able to afford that. When Gen. Petraeus testified before congress about the surge last year, there was a lot of talk about whether or not it would result in victory but no one argued that the additional troops would cost nearly $30 billion and these are tough economic times.
So a very simple solution to funding health care for everyone in this country would be to pull out ALL the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately and put the money that would be spent there into a world class heath care system that would provide unlimited free (paid for with the war money) health care for everyone.
No one knows exactly what the health care reform package that ultimately passes will cost and estimates vary widely depending on whether the estimator is for or against the proposal. But surely a great deal, if not all, of what it would cost could be covered if we could honestly face the consequences of our upside-down priorities and cared more about healing people than about killing them. The Obama administration has recently put to rest the useless "war on terror" slogan that did little but recruit more terrorists. Maybe we can replace it with a new one to help rearrange our domestic priorities. How about a "war on war." Shouldn't more people be saying this?
