We need to drop the health care mandate

I'M ONE of few Americans who don't own a television. Very few Americans. I think there are three of us left. This means I have extra time to follow issues that matter. Health care reform is one of those issues, and I have followed the headlines and fine print about as carefully as someone could who works full-time.

So after finding a seat on the bus heading into downtown Portland this morning, I read Senator Merkley's two-page declaration of pride and angst on why he voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Senator Merkley, you listed seven frustrations with the bill. (This included the sentence, "And I could go on." So we'll pretend there are another 10 or so?) Then you devoted the remainder of your two pages to celebrating sections of the legislation that now ban what should have never been legal in the first place while heralding what should have been legal long ago. A Health Care Bill of Rights, as one example, that no longer allows "the practice of dumping policy holders who get sick or injured." As well as an amendment--which you described as one of your "favorites"--that guarantees "every mother returning to work the privacy and flexibility in break time needed to nurse her child or pump breast milk."

Here's my "favorite" (including the pretend sentences) of all your sentences: "And here is the fundamental accomplishment: Because of this bill, health care in the United States of America is no longer a privilege, it is a right."

A "right"? Really? What dictionary are you using, Senator? Maybe a dictionary that President Obama loaned you? Maybe the same one that a "progressive" health insurance lobbyist loaned him? Fortunately, my mom and I play a lot of Scrabble so I own a lobbyist-free dictionary. My dictionary defines a right as "a moral, ethical, or legal principle considered as an underlying cause of truth, justice, morality, or ethics."

Right: I like the word. I even like the words used to define the word. And yet I can't understand how you, Sen. Merkley, or President Obama, or any self-proclaimed progressive member of Congress can declare--in the name of truth, justice, morality, and ethics--that an individual mandate for health insurance is a "right." It is a mandate. Try a thesaurus.

Mandate is a synonym for requirement. And a requirement is not synonymous with a right.

YOU CAN do many things as a politician, Senator Merkley, but I can't in good conscience allow you--as my senator--to give a hypocritical twist to the definition of a right. You voted for a requirement for families--families already struggling to survive--to have yet one more monthly bill to pay. Money that could be essential for food or school supplies or heat on a bitter cold night will now be forced to go to a health insurance company. Notice that this doesn't sound like anything even remotely based in truth, justice, morality, or ethics. That's because it's a requirement! Not a right!

Between the 2008 Presidential election and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality marches, there have been so many comparisons to this being a new civil rights era that I can't help but think of Rosa Parks.

I can't help but think of how different our country would be today if the response in the years following her arrest would have been for Congress and the Johnson Administration to pass the Transit Rider Protection and Affordable Transportation Act. I can't help but think of how maddening it would be today to look back at a letter from an Oregon Senator proclaiming: "And here is the fundamental accomplishment: Because of this bill, riding a bus in the United States of America is no longer a privilege, it is a right."

Yet what if the bill implemented a requirement for everyone without a car--including Rosa Parks--to buy a monthly bus pass? What if the bill left most of the longstanding injustices to continue rotting on the social vine of this country? What if Rosa was still forced to sit in the back? What if bus stops without any white folks waiting to board were still passed by? What if you only needed to ride a bus once per week, but now you were required to buy a monthly pass? "Well, Mrs. Parks, there's a lot this bill doesn't do. We understand there's still rampant discrimination that goes against every semblance of truth, justice, morality, and ethics. But there is also much that is good in this bill. Let's not forget one of my favorites: mothers can now breastfeed their babies on city busses!"

The most forgiving excuse for this so-called accomplishment of a health care reform bill is that progressives are hoping to expedite a revolution of working class families. A revolution of moms and dads who will be forced to file bankruptcy in record numbers when the slow monthly financial drain to health insurance companies leaves nothing in the piggy bank when a major health expense isn't covered by their policy. Yet there's one enormous problem with this scenario: nowhere in any of your oaths of office does it state that you're being paid to bankrupt working class Americans! Nowhere. I checked!

BUT WHAT'S a senator to do? What's a president to do? What's a Congress to do? Here's a start: drop the damn mandate!

I can already hear the rumblings. "It's complicated, Mrs. Parks." Yes, yes, yes. It's always complicated. Except when it isn't. Because if there's no mandate then what's the point? And that is the point. Without a mandate, insurance companies don't profit from the monthly sweat and stress of working-class families. Without a mandate, there's no need for a fictionalized reality created by the dictionaries and thesauruses of health insurance lobbyists. Without a mandate, we can look at alternatives to the $476 billion in subsidies projected to land in the laps of health insurance companies. (Which sounds eerily similar to the bailout that Wall Street received, but the dictionaries you're using probably define it differently.)

I agree with the 17,000 physicians affiliated with Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) who have gone on record saying that the negatives in the Senate bill outweigh the positives. "But this is just a first step, Mrs. Parks. It will need to be a step-by-step process like it was with Social Security." Yet as PNHP stated, "Social Security's first step was not a mandate that payroll taxes which fund pensions be turned over to Goldman Sachs!"

There are millions of Rosa Parks who need every progressive in this country to boycott the health insurance busses right now. Our current system is broken. No question. Yet the road ahead will not be fixed by digging deeper potholes. Self-proclaimed progressive politicians can continue to hide "single payer" under the covers, brush it under the rug, arrest the physicians and nurses who dare call out its name within the marble walls of Capitol Hill, and wave it off as implausible.

Just remember that this makes you the very people who would have told Rosa Parks (and Claudette Colvin before her and Jackie Robinson before both of them, all of who were arrested for refusing to give up their seats on busses) to just get to the back of the bus where they belong. "Because, you see, Mrs. Parks, you see, Ms. Colvin, you see, Mr. Robinson, it truly is complicated. Basic dignity and decency for all just isn't plausible right now." Yet history would have proved you wrong then and it will prove you wrong now.

Sen. Merkley, President Obama, and self-proclaimed progressive members of Congress: You can and must do better. Burn your dictionaries. Ditto for your thesauruses. Play more Scrabble. And get single payer on the bus. If you must stick with a step-by-step mantra then remember this as a first step to creating health care as a right for all: drop the damn mandate!

Good health to you,