Misplaced Priorities

Americans have choices to make about what they want for themselves and their children. To assert that we can't afford healthcare reform is to make such a choice. I would argue that such an assertion is a colossal mistake in light of the other, far more expensive choices that have been made with taxpayer money over the past eight years. More to the point, those alternative policy choices (tax cuts for the wealthy and funding endless, senseless, unwinnable, bloody, expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) have been wasteful and ineffective on an extreme scale. For opponents of healthcare reform to be critical of cost sounds powerfully hypocritical or powerfully uninformed after the past eight years. Spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the wealthy and wars that bankrupted the nation were perfectly acceptable in the Fox News viewing community under the previous administration, but now they are concerned about the cost of policy action. The deficit hawks of 2009 are far too late to the fiscal responsibility party and the average American has suffered because such tardiness.

While the business of enacting major social welfare legislation is never easy in the face of corporate resistance, healthcare reform specifically has been hampered by national priorities (misplaced as they often are) within government. Consider the well-known fact that the United States has the largest military-industrial complex in the entire world, larger than the next closest ten nations COMBINED. The cost of such a military has routinely hovered around 500 billion dollars or more in the past decade. In 2008, defense spending amounted to an obscene 636 billion dollars (a single year). The estimated cost of healthcare reform is 895 billion over ten years. That means that the American taxpayer is on the hook for over six trillion dollars over ten years in terms of defense spending. By contrast, healthcare reform will cost less than a trillion dollars over the same period of ten years, and healthcare reform is under attack by American conservatives for being too expensive. Um…

There is another entirely appropriate comparison to be made when we consider the overall cost-benefit analysis of healthcare reform. Healthcare reform in 2009 would cost far less (895 billion) than the two rounds of tax cuts (2.1 trillion dollars over 8 years, with benefits largely flowing to the wealthy) and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (1.3 trillion dollars over 8 years) under George W. Bush that bankrupted America in a way previously unseen. President Barack Obama pointed this out in his State of the Union address on September 9th, 2009. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and the National Priorities Project also made this distinction clear by detailing the potential social investment power of one trillion dollars. A trillion dollars could have built 8 million additional housing units, could have hired 15 million public school teachers for one year, could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start, could have insured 530 million children with healthcare for one year, or provided 43 million students with 4-year scholarships at public universities.

I'll say it again. We have choices to make regarding the overall welfare of America. The choices that have been made by a handful of slow-witted, silly, rich, conservative white men over the past eight years were undoubtedly the wrong choices, and the great majority of Americans have suffered because of those choices. To look forward and claim that our social welfare policy choices (healthcare, education, infrastructure) absolutely have to be constrained by cost is to deny reality and to ignore previous mistakes. There will be further disagreement about healthcare reform, regulatory reform, and entitlement spending in the years ahead, but what is not in dispute is how America got here. Endless spending on two disastrous wars and two equally disastrous rounds of tax cuts brought America to its financial knees. The time has come to reorganize our priorities. If we want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and basic public services that define a developed nation to survive, we have to stop squandering trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the wealthy and endless wars that inflame anti-American sentiment around the globe. Stop listening to the Joe Liebermans, John McCains, and Fox News commentators that sent us into this collective quagmire in the first place. The arsonists are in no position to accuse the firefighters of wasting water.

This is one of those pivotal moments where we make a collective decision about what is important to us. If access to healthcare, education, and a middle-class quality of life really are important to the vast majority of Americans (and I suspect that they are), we have to decide that we will spend the money to achieve those goals. If tax cuts for a tiny minority of wealthy people and endless, unpopular wars are more important, then the status-quo will be entirely acceptable. Make up your mind America, and soon, because time really is money.