PrintAugust 24, 2009
Infatuation with Crisis
The slow, ugly death of health care reform reflects the left's deep crush with crises. Government, of course, is a necessary evil. Even Marxists dream of a distant future in which the state will "whither away." Global Warming is a crisis, even though there is a profound disagreement among scientists about which direction the climate is changing and whether people can have any significant impact upon any change that is taking place.
Periodically we are informed that there is an infrastructure crisis -- roads, bridges, water lines, school buildings, etc. are wearing out because they are getting older. The largely mythical "Hunger in America" in the 1960s was a crisis which produced the Food Stamp Program, and now -- with a straight face! -- Leftists' planners warn us that obesity is the most serious health problem of the poor. Monumental levels of government "stimulus" spending was supposed to end the economic crisis (which could never -- of course -- be the consequent of monumental levels of government spending in the first place!) And now, of course, we face (whether we are deemed "smart" enough to see it or not) a health care crisis.
In a way, life is a serious of crises. We all will get sick and die. Families, religious congregations, communities have for ages quite naturally provided what comfort, help, and support they can. Hospitals, for example, were essentially creatures of religious orders not acting in response to a particular "crisis," but rather in accordance with religious injunctions to care for the sick.
Economies are intended to fluctuate -- there would be little reason for a stock market if economies were static -- and almost everything that the left deems a "crisis" is simply the natural process of change in any normal society. It is not change that Obama and his disciples believe in. It is free and rational change that terrifies them. They have a single, old, failed model for society: central planning by bureaucrats. Replicating the Fabian Socialists of Britain, the New Deal, and the other myriad examples over the last century, from National Socialism's highly planned system of economic development and health services, to old style, hopelessly obsolete labor unions, is the dream of Obama.
There is no health care crisis, and the problems which exist in any system are being quietly, privately, addressed. How many people have seen jars in small businesses asking neighbors to donate money from a child needing medical care? How many millions of Americans have given money and time for such wonderful facilities as St. Jude's Hospital or the Shriner's Hospital? How many congregants of churches and synagogues visit people in the hospital or do volunteer work? Aside from the simple truth that economic markets work better than central planners, private compassion intelligently provided is often the best medicine of all.
Perhaps the most profound repudiation of the Marxist notion of capitalists acting as soulless competitors grinding down the poor is vast outpouring of private contributions and, in the case of medical personnel in private practice, donated services not just for family and neighbors, but for total strangers. I have known neurosurgeons who performed very expensive operations for nothing, even paying for the travel costs of patients. I have known heart surgeons who have done the same thing.
What is our health care "crisis"? It is a crisis of government bureaucrats who take years to allow effective, often inexpensive, drugs which have been used in Europe to be used in America. It is a crisis of rapacious trial lawyers who never heal anyone, but who transfer massive amounts of money used for medical purposes into mansions and expensive law offices. It is a morass of federal regulation of state medical assistance programs, so that federal regulations rather than common sense dictate how state governments care for their citizens?
Despite the depictions from the left, our crisis is essentially imaginary. Information about medical care and procedures among patients is increasing exponentially because of the internet, as well as support groups which provide real experiences and also moral support. Miracle drugs, which cost a lot, are still miracle drugs, and the pool of cheap, good, generic drugs grows virtually every day. Without incentives or threats, those Americans who wish to live healthy lives through exercise, diet, abstinence from dangerous habits, and so forth, make that choice. And a profoundly compassionate American society is providing much of what is still lacking.
Crisis, to the left, means imperfect. It pleads, in spite of history, that Utopia is heaven, rather than hell. All life has some sickness, some injury, some loneliness, some doubt, some fear, some want, and certain, though undetermined, end. Our planet, also, will cool or warm or someday, perhaps, be hit by an asteroid. Life is filled with imperfections that are not crises. The real crisis is when we stop being human and become sheep, snapped by the Border Collies of the left into an existence of endless little crises like which pond to drink from or which lane to follow. The real crisis is when we surrender our will to those drunk on our panic.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
