by Donald Kaul

What in the world is Barack Obama waiting for? He’s been president nearly two months and he hasn’t been able to fix the stock market, he hasn’t been able to fix the banks and the war in Iraq is still going on. And that’s not all he hasn’t done. (I’ve been listening to right-wing talk radio, so I know.) He hasn’t lowered health care costs, he hasn’t made our educational system into the equivalent of a Swiss boarding school and he hasn’t saved our auto industry from drowning.

Worst of all, he hasn’t gone through the federal budget line by line and taken out the earmarks we all hate so much until we get one.

What’s he doing with his evenings, watching television?

I’m not being serious; I was just having a senior moment. (Some people, when they have a senior moment, they forget things. I start to think Republican. Fortunately, the moment passes.)

The right-wing clackers are serious though, at least as serious as they ever get. They are unable or unwilling to give our new president credit for anything. And the Republican (ha-ha) leaders follow their lead. (Actually, it’s Rush Limbaugh they follow. Every time a Republican politician suggests that the King of Blather is of less than divine parentage, he or she is made to go straight to the Great Man, touch forehead to the floor and chant “Rush is Great, Rush is Good.”)

The Republican case against the president so far is roughly this: He is trying to bring down the Free Enterprise system that has made our country great and replace it with – are you ready for this? – SOCIALISM. (I’ll wait until you revive the people who have fainted.)

This is particularly true of health care. We have the greatest health care system in the world, they say, and Mr. Obama is trying to muck it up with socialistic principles.

Let me say this about that: We do not have the greatest health care system in the world. As a matter of fact, by any standard you care to choose – average life span, infant mortality rate, death of women in childbirth – the performance of the United States compared to the other industrialized states is appalling.
For example, even in Cyprus people have longer life expectancy than Americans do. Cyprus!

American children, according to United Nations figures, are twice as likely to die by age five as children in Portugal, Spain or Slovenia, and an American woman’s chance of dying in childbirth is three times that of a woman in Germany, Spain or Greece. Greece!

What we have here is a health care system very much like our educational system. (All those who think we have the best educational system in the world raise your hands.)

If you’ve got a lot of money in this country you can get very, very good health care, just as your children can get a very, very good education. If you’ve got middle-class money, enough to afford insurance and a house in a good neighborhood, you still can get pretty good health care and a decent education. Less than that, you’re on your own.

According to the latest figures, we’ve got 47 million uninsured people and, with joblessness escalating, more on the way every day. In none of the countries ahead of us in health care do people depend on being employed for their insurance. They all have a national health plan.

Are there problems with national health insurance? Of course. Shortages of various kinds develop and long waits for some treatments can result. But for the most part it works. I have yet to meet a Canadian of modest means who would trade his or her system for ours.

A disease doesn’t care whether it’s being treated by a capitalistic or socialistic system. It prefers not to be treated at all. Which is what our present system delivers all too often.

Our health care system, far from being the greatest, is a national disgrace.