Healthcare reform is the big political tempest of the day, so that’s where I’ll be starting with this blog. These are treacherous waters, but rising above the white-capped waves is the Parable of the Island:
A band of seafarers was shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Dragging themselves out of the surf, they immediately set about building shelters and finding sources of food and water, doing all the things necessary for their survival. It was the thick of winter, so they had to work fast.
This effort included medical care for four members of the party who got hurt in the wreck: two men with broken arms, a woman with a broken leg, and a child with life-threatening internal injuries. Fortunately, one of the castaways was a doctor. She ended up spending most of her time tending to the injured. No one objected to this, of course. Everybody pitched in to do all that was necessary, and after a few weeks, they had survived the worst of it. They had shelters, food, and water, the injured were on their way back to full health, and the hardy band was ready for whatever further adventures awaited it.
A happy ending! (Or beginning.) But now comes the troubling part: Why isn’t this our ending? (Or beginning?)
Here we find ourselves on the island that is America: thrown together, forced to survive by our collective labors. Wouldn’t you think that at the very least, we should have secured the basic necessities for life — shelter and food and water, and medical care — for every member of our group by now? Instead, millions of Americans can’t afford or qualify for health insurance, and millions more think they are covered but won’t be as soon as they lose their jobs or contract some disease that their insurer decides it doesn’t want to pay for after all. Broken arms are going unmended, or the cost of their mending is bankrupting their owners, and every day, children are dying that needn’t have.
How can this be?
If you stranded any random twenty Americans on that island, not one of them would argue that injured members of the group should be denied whatever care they needed. Everyone would understand that medical care was a basic necessity. They would pull together to do everything necessary for the good of the group.
Why are sentiments that would seem obvious to any band of twenty castaways so hard for a nation of three hundred million to come to terms with? Is it just a question of numbers? If so, at what point does the right thing to do become optional? When twenty grows to forty? One hundred? One million?
What happened between the Island and the “City on a Hill”?
Tags: healthcare reform