Republican Mythologies and Healthcare

Amaury Perez
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, he said to me, “You must not ask for so much.” And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

I always loved those lines. It basically said to me; when you are young you reach out and expand and when you are weak/sick you learn to accept what you have. The Ying and Yang of life, easily observed in the different stages through the art of song/poetry.

We all live with mythologies. They are like maps of how to navigate our lives and the trajectories we take. It’s easier to see the mythologies of others and harder to recognize our own since since these maps of our life have taken time to develop from experience and justified from our parents’ examples and values, etc.

It always grabs me that Republicans still believe in rhetoric of an old mythological America. Brit Hume, a self-righteous American speaking about Obamacare says; “it neglects the core ethic values that were embedded in the Constitution and that comprise the basic philosophy of this country: spend your life working hard, playing hard and not burdening others with your problems. Make yourself capable of anything and all shall be given to you. That means that every American’s basic responsibility is to take care of themselves first, which is to say, make sure they don’t get sick and fall into the care of others. If that happens, you’ve pretty much lost the right to call yourself an American, as cruel as that sounds.” First, there is no “take care of themselves first” need to prioritize the individual above the community, they are symbiotic concepts and reality. Of what need is a person to take care of himself if there is no community to be a part of? Even Neanderthals belonged to a community. If there’s a priority to be weighed, it might be just a balance of %50 self and %50 community; they are equally important. Ironic that Trump’s rise was based on a foundation of American loss of community values expressed through ethno-nationalism; a mythological American community.

Believe it or not, people still believe this Mickey Mouse interpretation of American values. They spread ideas that justify their status of having “made it” in America as individuals. In the context of healthcare there is an underlying idea that you are responsible for your own health and care, this is said while simultaneous claiming American values of family, community and generosity. There is a case to be made for the conservative value of caring for your family and the immediate community. What is seldom asked is how far does this community go? Is it a two mile radius or 10 miles? Are those “across the tracks” another community or yours? These concepts are not throw-away but important, because we need to understand that our society has fundamentally changed because of technology and speed. We are very aware of what is happening in the relatively near vicinity; no person wants a coal plant spewing out particulate matter near their home, let alone dangerous unregulated chemicals spilled into the lake we go boating in. Apparently the poor and uneducated do?

We have a hidden class system based on property values that reflect American values themselves. For those living “across the tracks” we have created a mythology that says those people have chosen that life and are responsible for it. They are if not responsible for the unregulated chemical plant near their vicinity they are consequentially responsible for their cancer. How can one be a victim and still be responsible? They only way is to resort to patriotic credentials and racial innuendo; I’m an American, a victim of international and elite forces, read: un-American and unpatriotic forces. Americans and specially Republicans do not like victims. Though it seems Trump has risen by the validation of the victimization of American workers, of course only through the scapegoating of unpatriotic forces and international cabals; it certainly could not have been the natural forces of technological change and the fluidity of money/value let alone American laziness or lack of education.

And so we come to healthcare. Trump and Republicans have risen to the occasion by blaming “elites” for undermining our American “Constitution” and creating a nation of “freeloaders.” It seems the Republican “sheep” have actually drank the Republican elite’s ideological kool-aid but, in no way can the Republican elites save them from the forces of change nor the inevitable shrinking of our traditional “small town” American values. What they lack in imagination they makeup for in blame and self-righteousness. For example let’s imagine a normal scenario: a self-employed person (painter? Handyman?) walks into a Hospital with fatigue. He has no insurance because it’s too expensive. They do tests and find out he has leukemia. Let’s say they treat him, they assume that somehow they will get paid; house or savings might be collateral. If he can’t pay the bill that will be sent to the local and state government for reimbursement. What will be those cost? Let’s be conservative and say $1 million. Who will pay this? Why of course the “community” of taxpayers! The nurses, the doctors, the tests and the medicines will all have to be paid for. Unless of course we have nurses that work 12 hour shifts as volunteers and the pharmaceutical companies donate the medicines for free. If the person had had insurance, the insurance companies would have worked out a deal with the Hospital to only bill them for $500k. How do the insurance companies pay this out? It’s called actuarial science; the healthy/young in the pool pay for the old/sick. If there are too many sick people or the underlying cost of medical care rises then the cost of insurance will rise (what has been happening for more than 20 years, people are older and medical care has risen), the community of insurance policy holders will all pay. In sum, the community (taxpayers or other insurance holders) always pays for the sick, poor and old.

Poverty and mental illness are both diseases of individuals AND of the community, equal partners for life. For some reason we think we are not affected by mental illness or poverty. We assume the cost is purely on the individuals as if we could live in insular worlds. Mental illness is not unlike living with mythologies that are not applicable nor adaptable to the world at large. Mental illness might be a very logical adaptation or aberration to a traumatized life; it’s not applicable to the world at large but to an individual’s search for meaning by seemingly extreme myths.** If a mentally ill person pushes someone in the subway or stabs someone, that affects not only the victim but all of us. This will be paid for by us all. We pay much lip service to the argument of “nature versus nurture” when it comes to the influence that a child grows up in, we think that those people living “across the tracks” are all committing self-inflicted damage. Very few lack the imagination to think of how a desperate environment can alter the mind and the values of a human being let alone the mind of a child. Yes some parents value the arts and the sciences but most are working and school functions as simple “daycare.” The ones on the “good” side of “the tracks” have already a system of subconscious values we instill in our children and then assume their child’s success was theirs alone and not dependent on the non-desperate values of the community they are part of.

*http://politicer.com/brit-hume-giving-health-insurance-to-sick-people-defeats-the-core-ethic-values-of-this-country/

**The Abyss of Madness: George Atwood

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