America Needs a Doctor.
The Reverend preached a sermon about healing Sunday morning. We’re all sinners and need to heal the hurt in our souls, we were told. But no one missed the more secular point. What we really need right now is healing as a nation.
President Obama is calling for healing after the wretched 2016 campaign. So is president-elect Trump. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talked about healing the other day, although he has proven himself to be a man of shallow principle and sounded less convincing.
Healing is not going to be easy.
There is so much that needs forgiving. Things got said. Donald Trump won the election on a campaign built out of lies and bigotry. And even then he lost the popular vote, squeaking out a win on points in the enigmatic Electoral College. And yet it was an astonishing, unexpected victory. Look at things from Mr. Trump’s point of view. He fought his way to the Presidency abandoned by everyone with a brain in his own party, and despised by a majority of the country he needs to govern.
There is much that needs forgiving, on both sides. Healing is going to take some effort.
I’ve lived my life in Minnesota, so what should happen now is clear to me. We need to get to work. Minnesotans learned long ago that life on the prairie is unforgiving enough. You don’t want the extra burden of carrying a grudge. We have a simple prescription for times like this. Get to work. Be glad for the hands working alongside you even if you might not agree with the opinions attached to them. It helps with the heavy lifting. It helps us start moving beyond divisions.
This nation needs a project, and we have a good one staring us right in the face. Why not let the work of healing begin with healing itself?
Our healthcare system has been a political football for years. We’ve kicked it around so much that it’s lumpy and the air is leaking out. Just about everyone running for anything during the last election had something to say about the healthcare system. So let’s get to work fixing it. Heal healing.
It should be our finest endeavor. We have the talent, my home state of Minnesota being a prime example. Drive southeast out of the Twin Cities and you see the glass and stone towers of the Mayo Clinic rising out of the cornfields like some technological Oz. We hear stories all the time of the wonders worked there. Amazing cures for patients who thought hope had abandoned them.
The problem is the delivery system. This country can’t seem to settle on a plan to reliably connect these healing miracles with the people in desperate need of them.
So back to work we go. At least we have some advantages that we lacked in the debate eight years ago. When President Obama set out to fix a broken healthcare system the Republican Party opened up siege warfare on the entire process. Now they’re the ones on top. It’s time to lift the siege. Pick up this battered political football and try running with it.
The Democrats have good reason to help rather than merely take over the refusenik role from the Republicans. There is much about the Affordable Care Act that’s working, in particular the 20 million Americans that for the first time have decent health insurance. Critics who say the program is a disaster are dead wrong. The Democrats have good arguments to the contrary and these will carry weight, especially if they’re accompanied by good ideas to fix the parts of Obamacare that aren’t working so well.
Maybe I’m a naïve optimist to think it could work so. But there’s an icy coating of winter’s first snow outside my window, reminding me it also takes a lot of naïve optimism to live in a city that’s frozen solid for much of the year. Yet here I am. And now we’re hearing Mr. Trump say the provision in the Affordable Care Act that forbids insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting medical conditions might be worth keeping after all.
That’s a good place place to start. Insisting on a healthcare system that doesn’t kick people out just because they were unlucky enough to get sick makes the job harder. But it keeps the work honest. Like the grit that causes the oyster to produce the pearl, it just might be the thing to force creative thinking on both sides.
We want to get this right.
Consider the recent story in the Minneapolis paper of a cancer patient who’d been told she only had months to live, until she traveled to the Mayo Clinic and tried a more aggressive chemotherapy program. It worked. She’s been given a new lease on life, even the prospect of living to see her daughter graduate from medical school. And now her insurance company has abruptly canceled the policy that covers her treatments at Mayo.
Consider all the people at a loss about what to do right now, with premiums going up and insurance companies abandoning them in spite of the Affordable Care Act. Or in some cases because of the Affordable Care Act. It comes down to a failure of both the legislative solution and the free market. We need to find a new combination of both that finally works to make healthcare available to all in our uniquely American system.
So many of us need healing in so many ways. I’d get started now.
Agree? Disagree? Please comment and share. Let’s keep the conversation going.
