Compassion and Obamacare

I am a big believer in the the concept that I am my brother’s keeper.  It is one of my most important values.  I learned this from the fundamentalist religion I grew up in.  It is another way of saying healthy humans have compassion for others.  To see the suffering of others and wish to rectify it is to be human and in touch with life and living.

As a country, we are the best at many things.  Our military machine is second to none.  Our economy allows us to produce more, more of everything, than has ever been produced in all of history.  We know how to consume, more than any other people on this planet, today and throughout all of history.  My guess is that we produce and consume more in days that previous generations did in their life time.  We have harnessed capitalism to produce stuff and perfected marketing to convince us that we need that stuff to have a full life.  But we have not stopped to ask ourselves if this consumption is good, is it one of our values, is it compatible with our values?

We have made the individual the King.  The net result of it all though is a lot of individuals disconnected from the whole, from each other, craving the next big high to offset being ALONE.  In pushing the individual, we have minimized our connection to others. This orientation shows up in all of our social and political decisions, the right of the individual to unlimited consumption while the basic needs of others are not met.  This value is more or less the embodiment of a lack of compassion. We are part of the whole, all is interrelated, and what we do affects the whole.

Obama-care has the compassionate goal of Giving medical care to those have little or no medical care.  In my case this is very personal.  I believe my daughter is alive today because of the rule in Obama-care that allowed my daughter to stay on our medical insurance until age 26.  At age 24, she got exposed to mold that her lungs were allergic to … it nearly killed her even with extensive and expensive medical care.  My coffers were already low from supplementing insurance to get my wife good medicare care for her cancer which she died from.  My daughters lungs are permanently damaged and she has several other health issues that must still be addressed as she approaches her 26th birthday with a pre-existing condition.  Thanks to Obamacare, my daughter will continue to get medical help.  Thank you for your compassion in helping my daughter have medical support.

I hear three objections* to Obamacare: 1) we can’t afford it, and 2) it is poorly conceived, and 3) it violates our rights as Americans.  None of these reasons negate the need for compassion in our society, nor do I fully buy into any of these arguments, but I do acknowledge and address them below.  If you believe there are values more powerful than compassion that we are not addressing because of Obamacare, please make them.  I will listen.

Our culture of consumption is gradually replacing all of our other values.  Addiction to oil is just shorthand way of saying we are addicted to consumption, to MORE.  The primary function of our military is to assure that our consumption of everything is not disrupted, that the world conforms to our values, primarily our value of consumption.  Environmental problems are all linked to and made worse by our gods of consumption.  Drugs, our value of wanting More in the absence of a connected compassionate society.  Obesity, our addiction to wanting More bits and More in every bite (mostly sugar).  

Consumption and compassion are at polar opposites in our values.  We have been lead to believe we can just create more and that we all can have all we want.  That what we want and get does not take away from what others have. Our national and private debt is a result of that belief that we can have unbounded consumption.  It is a result of not having enough compassion to realize we can not as the strong have everything and still take care of the needs of those suffering more than us.  We can not have everything, we can not continue to consume more and exercise our compassion for those without medical help.   

For those with compassion that helped get Obamacare passed and that work to improve it, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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*Objections to Obamacare

1. We can’t afford it.
1. It is a matter of priorities isn’t it? True, we already spend more than what we take in as country and we have a huge debt, $18 trillion.  To be able to help people get medical care, we must find something else in the budget that we care less about collectively.  For me it is easy to find things I care less about: military spending (triple that of Russia and China combined), subsidies to oil companies, bailouts for wall street, lower effective taxes for the rich, etc.  With compassion, perhaps we can find things to eliminate or reduce in our budget in order to help others with their medical needs.
2. We can work together to help us with medical care more efficiently so that we can better afford it.

2. It is poorly conceived.
1. Considering one party pushed it through and another party fully resisted it, it is by definition poorly conceived.  
2. For it to be better conceived, we must as a nation have enough compassion for those without medical care to want to want to give up something to give others medical care.
3. Then we must work together to find the best way to help those without medical care.  It is not magic, it is working together for all brothers on this planet.
3. It violates our rights as Americans.
1. Obamacare mandatory premiums are a tax.  Get over it, it does not violate our rights anymore than the income tax, see the 16th Amendment (an unlimited amendment is the big mistake).  
2. But, it does violate our expectation that congress work together to address needs of our nation and its people in an effective manner.