Let’s climb aboard my time machine and travel back to the 1930s, when the Great Depression plunged the U.S. and the world into economic freefall. Unemployment in this country was at 25 percent. Homes and farms were being foreclosed by the millions. Even banks failed. It went on for years. People argued over solutions. Many charged that if the rich just released their white-knuckled grip on their wallets and gave to the poor, we would all be better off. Others said that the federal government, the only institution big enough to matter, was the only possible engine of recovery.
President Franklin Roosevelt presented his New Deal. It tried to put the government to work to put the rest of the nation to work. He proposed using federal tax money to employ the jobless first at leaf-raking jobs, then, more constructively, in road- and bridge-building jobs. Both would benefit the populace at large, but in differing degrees. But this plan met with strong opposition. Critics said it was rank socialism, copying the tyrannical U.S.S.R., which made the Kremlin the massive Big Brother, manipulating industry and agriculture with the overview of central planning. This looked great on paper but failed disastrously, with Stalin starving to death millions of Ukrainians, who tended the breadbasket of the U.S.S.R. The New Deal was not universally beloved at the start.
One particularly vulnerable part of the U.S. population was the elderly, less able to work a job, if there was one to be found. So the president proposed something called Social Security. It wanted to set up a government program that would sustain the aged not in luxury but enough to minimally provide. Other nations had been successful at that time with such an arrangement. But critics said that we would be on the slippery slope to socialism, to the shared poverty and the incentive-less workforce of the Bolsheviks. Let charity feed the elderly.
But oddly enough, even gold-standard devotees came to accept the wisdom of this liberal program that had workers pay each payday into a common fund from which they would draw upon retirement. The age was set right near the average life expectancy of Americans, so freeloaders would not be enjoying what they had not earned and set aside. People dropped ideological grudges because they saw this was a workable way to boost the entire wellbeing of most economic sectors. So many critics ceased their opposition and began collecting their own Social Security, all with a straight face.
The moral of the story is that Americans realized when the bulk of the people join together in a fair program with widespread coverage, the country benefits. It is the same realization we come to when we buy home or car or other insurance. If enough people are in the pool, there is enough funding for the unforeseen expense of a house fire or a heart attack. If we all pull together, we will make it. We may grouse when we pay our insurer, and we may fume when medical costs rise with no end in sight. But we know what it would be like if we had no insurance. So we ante up.
Returning to the present, we find critics making the same objection on the same grounds. If we were to copy all the other industrialized nations who long have had universal health insurance for even the poor, we would plummet into Soviet socialism. We would be catering to grafters and sloths who would leech off the body politic. We would be encouraging laziness. Better to have church charity fund the needs of the ill poor.
I grant that some churches and other groups might want to prevent by law some elective surgeries such as abortions and sterilizations. But this could be done without eliminating universal health coverage, given that there are perhaps 40 million Americans currently uninsured, hoping that no one in their families gets sick or hurt.
One has to wonder about the real motivation of these critics who are so cavalier toward the daily precariousness of the poor. Is it to protect the wealthy, or at least the owners of small businesses now encumbered with the responsibility of paying slightly more since universal health insurance does not come free?
And let’s repeal the Second Amendment.
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