Letter 2 America for October 1, 2013

Dear America,

Today is the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness month.  On the early morning shows there are women singing sad songs and reports on prevention and survival, mammograms and Angelina Jolie, but I'm not seeing much about politics or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the role it will play in making both prevention and treatment available to tens of millions more women...women who would otherwise die earlier and more alone if The ACA hadn't been passed.  It's political awareness that both women and men need, not more ardent commiseration over the tragic consequences of cancer for all of us, and the biases of the electorate as a whole are largely the reason that you see more bemoaning of breast cancer's toll on women than discussion in layman's terms of the ACA, "Obamacare" as it is better known.

In a recent CNBC poll, Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a plurality of 44% to 38%, the rest of the sample being undecided, and the opposition to defunding grows to 59% when you throw in a government shutdown as the means of achieving that Tea Party cause célèbre.  In another CNBC poll, 46% of Americans were found to oppose "Obamacare."  Fortunately, only 37% oppose the Affordable Care Act.  At the same time, 30% didn't even know what the ACA was while only 12% didn't know what Obamacare was.  Apparently Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein were wrong.  There really is something in a name.  That Americans would allow the cancer carnage we now suffer out of political inclination is even worse than their willingness to do so out of ignorance, but neither is a commendation of the quality of American democracy.  Maybe Hamilton was right and we do need a body like The Senate to protect us from mob sentiment.  In fact, that seems to be a parallel phenomenon in this case.  The Senate has twice sent to the House of Representatives a "continuing resolution," that is a bill to refund government at current levels for a period of time, and twice The House has sent it back to The Senate with a rider on it defunding all or part of the ACA.  The plurality of Americans don't want defunding and want it even less if it comes at the cost of shutting down the government, which failure to pass a continuing resolution will cause, but the Tea Party inspired Republican majority in The House doesn't care, though they insist that the majority of Americans are on their side.  That is the voice of The Mob, and only The Senate stands between the plurality of us and them.

What I'm saying, as I often do, is that we should all remember this come the next elections in 2014.  The conservative Republican minority in this country, especially the reactionary fringe of it that calls itself The Tea Party, doesn't really have democracy in mind.  They want what they want, and they are willing to impose it on the rest of us on the premise that they know better than the majority does, and certainly better than the plurality does.  But the alternative to the ACA is nothing because they propose nothing to replace it upon defunding it, and that is because they are more concerned with the "role of government" in our lives than they are about how many of us survive disease.  They are willing to put a budgetary price on healthcare...not the military, but healthcare...and thus ration it so that only those above the first or second rung on our economic ladder can afford it; it is the ultimate form of social Darwinism...let the least of us die.  Remember that when you vote.

Your friend,

Mike