It Is Not Just a Matter of Apples and Oranges

The House is now tangling over a bill that has been purported to be a law of health reform. I’d like to suggest to you that there is a deeper issue which has far more unhealthy consequences. It’s what has held up a national healthcare reform, and and kept it captive as a hostage.

In our nation we have approximately 47 million people without any health insurance at all, and another 100 million people who are insured by their employers, but must use some other form of payment to pay off the balance of their medical bills. As you might guess many of these millions of people are the poor, those who have jobs but still are poor, the elderly, peoples of color, the homeless, etc. There’s something obscene when U.S. Senators have 110% in healthcare insurance coverage and 147 million have next to nothing to help them receive adequate healthcare. The elites and supposed “representatives” don’t give a damn about the lower class rung on the perpetual ladder of oppressive hierarchy.

What is the “bottom line” issue that I wrote about in the first paragraph? In essential terms we have a White Male System (WMS) that holds power, privilege and possession as a class of rulers. The English call them “Lords.” The only ones who fit into the category of this Democracy or Representative Democracy are the ones who took power at the beginning. The U.S. Constitution specifically articulates white males who own land that is worked by 3/5-of-a-person slaves stolen from other lands and brought here in the most despicable conditions. Since then de jeur equality may appear to be a reality, but where the rubber meets the road, it’s an illusion.

It’s always been about a white-designed-and-structured social, political, religious, educational, medical, legal and governmental system that has as its mission statement: never give up what you got so you can keep it and pass it along to your progeny so they can have the same privileges. At the heart of racism, for example, is the across-the-board enrichment of whites by the hands of those who serve them. Just like the Bob Dylan song goes, “You gonna have to serve someone….” This has always been the real motto of racism in our nation.

If the lowest classes of people (Hitler didn’t just persecute Jews, he aimed his Germanic spear at Gypsies, Homosexuals [they used to call “these kinds of people” by this label, right?! Did you know that?], Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, or anyone else that didn’t fit the super strong Aryan person of the Third Reich. A healthcare system like the one we have, divides classes, engenders internalized power struggles, and generally keeps those in this lower class sick, weak, having chronic diseases, fatigued, in financial debt, along with all of the psychological traumas that go with fearing for your life.

It keeps the poorer class dis-empowered, without advocacy, vulnerable, and often there is a transgenerational factor at play as well. Genetic factors and social environmental conditions, over generations, may open up progeny to similar illnesses and diseases. Unless you’ve lived the life of a fourth generation single mother in the projects you have no idea what kind of life this is. Or what living in these circumstances are like. The tension, stress and anxiety must be discharged somehow, then life is supposed to go on, only it’s the white supremacist class that doesn’t have to dirty their hands with this kind of life. After all, most of them are living in the burbs in big, empty houses.

This is why I say that the ruling elites will fight genuine health reform that will help every single human citizen of the U.S., but hurt those who have the most to lose. Threatened with a loss of their control and power in the healthcare arena, they will resist and fight all the way. Sad thing is that you’ll hear Ignorant Igor saying, “You see, I knew it. I knew all those _________________would eventually get all of their healthcare needs met. Now we’ve got universal healthcare for all! The next thing you know, they’ll want all of us taxpayers to pay healthcare costs for the whole freakin’ universe.” This response is the typical, parroting of self-deluded ignorance you hear all the time. President Ronald Reagan fueled the fire in his infamous speech about all black women being welfare queens.

The U.S. plays fast and loose when it comes to picking and choosing which international laws, declarations, covenants, conventions they give legitimacy and assent, and which ones to ignore claiming they don’t exist; and choosing which ones are to our advantage as the Empire dictates. The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (you remember, don’t you, a body of all the nations of the world?) was ratified in 1948 as a convention to guide relationships between people within and without the nation. In our discussion of universal healthcare, the WMS needs to seriously change their perceptions of who they are, and who the rest of us are as well.

Article 25 of the Univerrsal Declaration of Human Rights,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
You can’t make it much plainer than that, can you? In the legislation currently in front of our House Lawmakers, I hope there a few brave people. I hope they get the kahunas to speak truth to power. The powers-that-be want to keep on getting, and the best way is to keep a system in place that delivers the goods—to them. And they don’t mind if the poor don’t get what they’re asking for. Yellow is the color of the eyeglasses they’re looking through.©Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.