Originally published in the Dedham Times December 1, 2017
“I just want a country where affording health care is easy and getting shot in the street is hard. Why is that so much to ask?”
– Greg Greene, June 14, 2017
This quote, originally delivered as a tweet, has stuck with me ever since I saw it. If the Democratic National Committee were smart, they would use it for their campaign slogan. But it also speaks to the great divide we have in the United States today, amplified by the usual gridlock in Congress and the unusual behavior of our president. Our problems stem from a disconnect between the ruling class in this nation, who are clearly not interested in the well-being of their people, and the average citizen, who is so fed up and disillusioned with the government that they no longer believe our problems are surmountable.
There were 372 mass shootings in the US in the year 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker. FBI data shows there were approximately 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016. According to the CDC, firearm deaths rose for the second straight year last year. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly sixteen times as many as Germany. It’s been five years since twenty children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and no major changes have been made in our federal gun laws.
How is this acceptable? Why are we treating these man-made incidents, done with man-made weapons, as if they are unpredictable acts of nature, like earthquakes and volcano eruptions? The answer is political courage, which is severely lacking in our government today.
After the recent massacres in Las Vegas, Nevada, Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Tehama County, California, it seems this type of horror is becoming part of everyday life in American society, and our nation’s leaders have done nothing to stop it. The federal assault weapons ban was allowed to expire in 2004 with the help of a Republican Congress and President George W. Bush. According to a Princeton University study, the number of mass shootings went down during the ten years that the ban was in effect. This same study indicates that mass shootings doubled since the ban was lifted.
In Australia, there is an entirely different picture. After a mass shooting in Port Arthur in 1996 where thirty-five people were killed, conservative Prime Minister John Howard instituted a sweeping reform in the country’s gun laws, including a mandatory buyback program, where 600,000 firearms were purchased and destroyed by the government. Since then, there have been no mass shootings (defined as incidents resulting in four or more victims), and according to a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Australian gun reform is also responsible for a decline in gun-related suicides and homicides.
Our problem here is that regardless of the facts and figures, there is a strong contingent of people in America who will simply point to the Second Amendment and say what happened in Australia, and other developed countries that have reformed their gun laws, cannot be done here. However, this amendment was written 230 years ago, at the same convention where the concept of a slave being worth three fifths of a human being was agreed on. A revision is merited. If we’re being honest about the debate over guns in the U.S., we have to agree that the weapons available in 1787 are not the same as the arsenal of mass murder that exists today. It would take 30 musketeers to match the output of one AR-15 rifle. Even a good soldier in the 18th century could only fire his weapon three times in a minute; the AR-15 can fire 100 shots in that time frame.
The Massachusetts Legislature was quick to respond to the Las Vegas shooting by banning bump-stocks, which were used by the shooter to convert his semi-automatic weapons to automatic weapons. However, there is still work to be done. In response to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, where the shooter used a Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9 mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol to kill 50 people, Attorney General Maura Healey moved to make copycats of banned assault weapons illegal. The Gun Owners’ Action League, the Bay State arm of the NRA, held a rally at the State House to protest the action. An unfortunately large group of House members, including my own, signed on to letters urging Healey to reconsider the order.
Wherever one may stand on this issue, we ought to at least find common ground in the basic idea that the status quo is completely unacceptable. I do not want to raise a family in an environment where my children could be victims of an armed madman’s whim. The weak laws we do have on the books are clearly not effective. We run the risk of becoming a shut-in society, where people simply do not feel safe enough to attend public events and restrict themselves to working and going home to watch Netflix. For example, consumer spending on Net video is projected to hit $13.6 billion this year, surpassing box office sales by more than $2 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Is that really the land of the free? We seem to be sacrificing our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in order to protect the right to bear arms.
The author of the document which enshrined those words, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Thomas Jefferson, also had sound advice for us on the utility of laws made centuries ago:
“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
This brings me to my second point: health care should be a human right.
Despite the best efforts of President Obama and most, but not all, Democrats in Congress, we are still left with a confused mixture of public and private health insurance plans with no relief in sight from skyrocketing costs. According to the Kaiser Foundation, during fiscal year 2016, combined federal and state spending for Medicaid in Massachusetts totaled about $17.1 billion, or over a third of the entire state budget.
State spending on Medicaid increased by about 32.5 percent between fiscal years 2012 and 2016. So while we have improved our coverage of people, we still have not resolved the challenge of an unsustainable fee-for-service payment system. When the Affordable Care Act went live in October 2013, I was working at the Massachusetts Health Connector. The state’s website for calculating premium tax cuts was down for months, leaving people unable to sign up for plans. For many of them, the most effective solution was to simply place them on MassHealth, the state’s version of Medicaid. This did not involve a complicated tax formula or plan selection process – we simply entered their information into the system and they were able to see their doctors.
Unfortunately, even in Massachusetts, people like Pete Frates have to endure astronomical costs for their health care. Frates, who suffers from ALS and has helped to raise millions for research via the Ice Bucket Challenge, requires around-the-clock care for his disease. His family has said it costs between $80,000 and $90,000 a month to keep him alive. His care is not entirely covered by insurance, forcing the family to seek outside donations to allow him to remain at home.
This is all too common in our society: we learn of a friend or relative who has fallen ill or suffered a grave injury, and inevitably a fundraiser or GoFundMe page is organized because insurance doesn’t cover the costs. President Kennedy called disease one of “the common enemies of man.” Why don’t we truly fight this enemy together, harnessing the same ferocity with which we fight other adversaries?
One of the most repeated arguments against universal health care is that it is seen as “socialism” or somehow antithetical to liberty. However, according to Forbes, of the eleven countries ahead of the U.S. in economic freedom, ten have universal coverage. In fact, as stated in The Atlantic, “The U.S. stands almost entirely alone among developed nations that lack universal health care.” There seems to be a deep-seated fear of “socialized medicine” among our political leaders, yet we already have Medicare for our seniors, Medicaid for our poor, as well as Tricare for our veterans, and we are still a capitalist country.
A Medicare-for-All system would resolve the payment problem and cover the 28 million people who still have no health insurance. If our health care system is expanded and reformed correctly, Medicare will be able to negotiate better prices for services and medicine than the insurance companies, which will bring down the skyrocketing costs, or “bend the cost curve,” as President Obama said. The plan proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders was estimated to cost $1.38 trillion over the first ten years, according to an analysis by UMass economist Gerald Friedman. Since President Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971, the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on that failed effort. According to the Department of Defense, taxpayers spent about $168 billion (roughly $950 billion in 2011 dollars) on the Vietnam War, and according to Brown University, $5.6 trillion on wars since September 11, 2001. According to the University of Texas, NASA’s total inflation-adjusted costs have been more than $900 billion from its creation in 1958 through 2014. Political courage, again, is what has stalled this long sought-after solution.
The Republican-controlled House has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act over 50 times and President Trump made Obamacare one of the central punching bags of his campaign, calling it a “disaster” and vowing to “repeal and replace” it on day one of his first term. They are more focused on finding new ways to cut taxes for the rich than new ways to provide health care for Americans.
Many gun rights advocates, including President Trump, have argued that we do not have a gun problem in this country, but a mental health problem. As the old, worn-out trope goes, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” If conservatives in Congress truly believe that, they should be in favor of expanded access to mental health services for the people who need it most. However, the American Health Care Act, which the House passed this year only to see it defeated in the Senate, would have cut Medicaid funding and decreased access to mental health counseling. So while our government would not even entertain background checks or closing the gun-show loophole in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, voting down the Manchin-Toomey Amendment in 2013, they were more than eager to cut the mental health services they point to each time a massacre happens.
Ever since the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill was filed in 1943, the uphill legislative battle to achieve national health insurance has been inching forward. Massachusetts may have to lead the way again on this issue. State Senator Jamie Eldridge filed a bill, S.619: An Act Establishing Medicare For All in Massachusetts, which would create a single-payer health care system for Massachusetts, guaranteeing coverage for every resident of the Commonwealth. I would like my legislators to become co-sponsors of this legislation.
The most encouraging news comes again from the Upper Branch of the General Court. The Massachusetts Senate recently passed a bill that includes an amendment, filed by State Senator Julian Cyr, to study the costs and benefits of a single-payer health care system in the state. This shows a willingness, at least, to move forward in the direction of true universal coverage. The House has not yet taken up this bill.
It is my hope that in the days ahead, our lawmakers on both sides of the aisle will stop worrying about their own re-election and start following the facts where they truly take them. I believe this path will lead toward increasing the health and safety of the people they swore to represent. As the late Robert F. Kennedy said, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” It’s past the time for us to ask this question of all our elected officials.
petr says
I don’t think so. Or, put another way, do you really think you would be asking this same set of questions under the Presidency of Hillary Clinton???
The voters willingly, willfully, elected a dim orange turd to the office. The Republican House and the Republican Senate are using the dim orange turd to enact their minority agenda. That’s the problem.
SomervilleTom says
Thank you for speaking the truth.
jconway says
Yes because we were asking them under President Obama. Elizabeth Warren started talking about the game being rigged way back in 2011 when she started running for Senator, and we still had a Democrat in the White House. I do not doubt that President Clinton would have been thousands of orders of magnitude better than the present incumbent, but I also think the problem of power and capital being concentrated in the fewest number of people in human history is the single issue or our time and a successful progressive platform calls that our and addresses it rather than denies that its real. Elizabeth Warren is not denying it is real.
SomervilleTom says
The disconnect between the ruling class and the rest of us is real and significant. I think you, petr, and I enthusiastically agree about that.
I read Petr’s comment as rejecting the claim that this disconnect is playing out in the gun control and health care debate.
We made more progress on both issues during the administration of Barack Obama than we did during the prior administration, and would have made far more if we had not been stopped by elected GOP leaders doing the will of their base. President Hillary Clinton would not have spent the first 18 months of her administration rolling back that progress.
These two issues rightly belong in the lap of the voters who put the current administration in office.
petr says
I’m not comfortable with the term ‘ruling class’ nor do I find the disconnect strictly limited to an ‘us v them’ dynamic… I think the dynamic is far more subtle and far more dangerous and masked by the blunt ‘us v them’: I think there is a comfort with Progressive hardlining that places a great many people in the ‘them’ category who do not belong there, Hillary Clinton being but the most obvious example. I remember a not too distant debate right here on BMG where someone lamented how Hillary Clinton wouldn’t go to meet coal miners. In frustration I googled “Hillary Clinton coal miner” and was immediately presented with a picture of Hillary Clinton in Coal County making eye contact with an actual out-of-work coal miner. This is the Left’s version of ‘disinformation’: They want to believe that Hillary Clinton is one of the bad guys… so they just do! It’s infuriating. It’s as much against reality as Fox News. Absent this Progressive hardlining, Bernie Sanders would have been the second coming of Dennis Kucinich.
As seen with the 2016 election, the danger is that it limits our available choices. The next election is going to feature a good honest, earnest, Democrat likely very much in the mold of Hillary Clinton, and that candidate will be dismissed and denounced according the template of Left wing disinformation and any real flaws will be twisted to fit the narrative.
And I think the OP who has come deciding to opine on what the disconnect is and who lies on either side of that chasm is part of this dynamic.
The people who have decided the tenor of our Republic at the present juncture, any such ‘ruling class,’ are the people who voted for a transparently incompetent president and a transparently corrupt Congress and the people on the other side for whom the good, isn’t good enough.
We have met the ‘ruling class’ and it is us…
fredrichlariccia says
Or, as Pogo said : “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I couldn’t agree more.
johntmay says
It is a human right in many nations but not here in the USA. We have a Republican party that wants no part of this. We have a large number of Democrats, including our last presidential candidate who did not agree with this and instead, wanted this “right” to be a commodity bought and sold in private markets. Thankfully we have a growing number of Democrats who are willing to take a bold stand and fight for us, regardless of how that may affect some of the wealthy donors on their email list.
SomervilleTom says
This is not about a “disconnect between the ruling class in this nation … and the average citizen.” This is, instead, about chasm between those who do and those do not care about facts, truth, rationality, and objectivity.
The facts about guns and health care have been all around us for at least a decade. I do not believe that any amount of naval-gazing, strategizing, re-inventing, or messaging is going to change the reality that too many of us willfully cast our votes out of uninformed bias and prejudice — or don’t bother to cast our votes at all.
In particular, more circular firing squads where we attack our own rather than admit the truth only compound the problem.
There are many examples of issues that genuinely pit the ruling (or ownership) class against the rest of us. Guns and health care are not among them.
If the 99% of us being killed, maimed, bankrupted, and otherwise devastated by these twin horseman of death are unwilling or unable to face the facts of all this, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
The facts and truth are more available than they’ve ever been in human history. Those who refuse to see them (or who see them and choose to do nothing) have only themselves to blame.
johntmay says
Yes, but so has a tidal wave of disinformation. Speak with a variety of independents and learn how successful that disinformation campaign has been.
But when we attack our own, we are not focused on attacking the ownership class. The ownership class owns the media and directs the message. I agree, attacking our own is an unwise strategy but we see it on all fronts.
petr says
Any, and all, ‘disinformation’ has been successful only because it is exactly and precisely WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE.….
Wake. Up.
jconway says
I think the linkage is that the right has invented a constitutional fiction that we have a right to unlimited firepower to kill and maim hundreds and challenge the monopoly of violence only the state should be entrusted to exercise. This is such a radical perversion of what the framers intended and what common sense dictates, and for far too long we have just accepted their framing on the actual question of rights and poked away at it with feeble regulations like background checks. I give the Parkland/Douglas students a ton of credit for putting a human face on the other side of the argument. At what point do your property rights interfere with my right to life? The framers were quite clear that the right to bear arms was soundly located in the defense of the commons. When that right plainly endangers the commons, it ceases to be.
Similarly, early founders from John Jay to Thomas Paine discussed a right to health care. Even Adam Smith argued that hospitals were,like roads and education, a province of the state and not of the marketplace. I think it is time we reclaim this history as well. Philosophically we are committed to a government where individual liberties are defended and respected while the community provides protection for those who cannot protect themselves. Be it from criminals or illness.
SomervilleTom says
I agree with all this. I think these two issues (guns and health), nevertheless, demonstrate the folly of attempting to ignore or deny the responsibility that each and every voter has in our democratic republic.
No awful government tyrants make voters choose to rely on information sources that routinely, brazenly, and explicitly lie to them. Whether it’s Fox News, Breitbart, or bot-ridden social network pages, a huge number of Americans choose lies, propaganda, and hate over actual reality. No oligarch forces these choices. MSNBC is just as available as Fox.
These are actual choices made by voters.
In my view, it is patronizing and demeaning to attempt to dismiss that with hand-waving about the “ownership class”.
One of the many ironies about this dismissal is that education is a fundamental pillar of resistance to this kind of ignorance. No, I will not sugar coat this reality by hiding it behind some less caustic word.
We are talking about “ignorance”. Sheer, mind-numbing, democracy-destroying ignorance.
Education empowers these voters to recognize that they are being manipulated and lied to. Education that shows these voters how to shut down these lies (starting by changing the frigging channel).
Education that reminds each voter of his or her primary obligation to recognize and then act on truth, rationality, and the rule of law.
jconway says
I think there is a way to do voter education that does not come across as patronizing or condescending. Years ago I debated a libertarian Republican on free trade who said rather dismissively “it’s not my fault those workers in the Midwest should just learn a new skill set”. I think too often I hear similar arguments on this blog that blame the displaced workers and non or wrong voters for their plight and hold the party that is supposed to protect them to a fairly low bar in exchange for stopping the greater evil of the GOP.
Voters had a choice between a fake populist and a genuine progressive running an anti populist campaign and they choose the fake one. I think we reject the opportunities this populist moment presents the left at our own peril.
I share all the valid concerns about bigotry, ignorance, and voter manipulation by cable news and foreign intelligence agencies. I absolutely think we can still win elections in Trump country despite those threats, as Barack Obama did four years ago. Elizabeth Warren focused like a laser on Scott Browns broken promises to the middle class and handedly beat the proto-Trump at his own game. The elites I decry are the Republicans waging war on the middle class, like Don Blackenship, who should never be able to win coal country with the miner blood on his hands. Being bold enough to call a spade a spade and is part of the way we win over new voters.
petr says
I am A) quite certain there is a way that does not come across as patronizing and condescending and 2) equally certain that most, if not all, candidates on the Left already do voter education that not only does not come across as patronizing or condescending but, in fact, is not, in any way patronizing or condescending.
On the entire other hand I find it entirely believable that many people on the Right feel they are being condescended to, or patronized. They feel this, and say this, because they are not fighting against liberalism, but against a caricature of liberalism that has been carefully constructed for them by a triad of political figures (neocons), media amoralists (Fox, Breitbart, etc) and corporate money (Koch, NRA, etc) to maximally engage their prejudices and entirely elide their intellect.
Your answer is to accept the caricature and adjust your behavior to omit the purportedly objectionable affect: that is to say, argue with the delusion. Besides being faintly mercenary and an entirely ridiculous thing to do, it simply will never work.
SomervilleTom says
I fear we’ve meandered away from the very concrete and specific starting point of the thread.
We are talking about voters who steadfastly reject ALL facts about gun control and health care. Voters who get their “information” from Fox news and Breitbart.
A significant share of voters in 2016 were opposed to “Obamacare” and “socialized medicine” and simultaneously — in the exact same polls — declared themselves in favor of the ACA and in favor of Medicare.
I’m just not going to accept your attempted pivot to yet another go-round of “a fairly low bar in exchange for stopping the greater evil of the GOP”. Enough.
When a voter is attached to beliefs and ideas that are factually WRONG (“Barack Obama was not an American”. “Climate change is a hoax”. etc), we do that voter no favors by turning handsprings to avoid coming across as “patronizing” or “condescending”.
I suggest that it is long past time to remind ourselves and those around us that in the real world, there are objective facts. Some positions are simply incorrect (or wrong). There ARE objective standards of correctness and measurability in these areas.
I suggest that we have created several generations of voters that are not only ignorant and uninformed, but also under the delusion that anything they believe or pronounce is true by the sheer virtue of being believed. Too many of us subscribe to the “Tinker Belle” theory of reality — “if you wish for it hard enough, and clap loudly enough, it will happen”
We will not turn aside this tide of ignorance by denying it. If we do not stop it, it WILL wash away us and our society.
fredrichlariccia says
ANTI – INTELLECTUALISM
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this dead horse riddle that we keep beating was solved by Isaac Asimov years ago when he said : ” There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
johntmay says
Anti-labor.
I believe your claims of anti-intellectualism are, in part. rooted on the opinions of many intellectuals who are anti-labor. This is not to say that intellectuals attack labor but they do present condescending attitude to those without a college degree and when asked about the wages of non-degree workers simply say “they need a better education:”.
SomervilleTom says
The “claims” are based on observed facts. It has nothing to do with labor.
A person who insists that the earth is 6,000 years old, that climate change is a hoax, and that Barack Obama was not constitutionally qualified to be president is not making a statement about labor.
That person is making a statement about ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
There are those who assert with great passion that the Earth is flat. As a culture, we desperately need to be more “condescending” towards such abject ignorance.
Christopher says
Are you suggesting HRC was anti-populist?
SomervilleTom says
Yes, he is. And I REALLY don’t want to go there — yet again.
Here’s the text:
That phrasing presupposes a boatload of stuff that is just not true. The very fact that we are STILL completely unable to let go of this fruitless debate nearly two years after the campaign demonstrates that the reality of the 2016 election is not nearly so simple.
No, no, no, a thousand times now.
Voters had a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The latter won the popular vote. In three battleground states (MI, WI, and PA) one group of voters turned out for Mr. Trump and another did not turn out for Ms. Clinton. All this stuff about populist vs anti-populist is just one theory.
It is a theory that is irrelevant to the question of why voters elected a President who so plainly rejects the plain, well-documented, and widely published truth about guns and health (among a long list of issues that where Mr. Trump rejects simple and well-documented facts).
johntmay says
She was not a populist. Does that mean she was anti-populist? Not necessarily. I don’t follow NASCAR but I am not anti-NASCAR.
johntmay says
Why do people want to believe these things? Or even better “cui bono? ” …… Who profits when these people believe these things?
That keeps me up at night.
Unless we know the answers to those two questions, we can’t stop the damage from being done.
SomervilleTom says
You’ve asked two completely separate questions:
1. Why do people want to believe these things?
2. Who profits when these people believe these things?
It is crucial to distinguish between these two questions.
The remedies implied by the answer to the first question are VERY different from those implied by the answer to the second.
johntmay says
Thanks for noticing.
Yup. That too is true,
I would not say so. The people profiting from preying on the ignorance of voters are at the root of the solution. As they say, follow the money.
SomervilleTom says
Consider a thought experiment. Suppose our fairy godmother waved her magic wand, and made it so that nobody profits from ignorance.
What will happen, starting the next day, for the people who want to believe “these things”?
SomervilleTom says
Interesting that my thought experiment merits only a downrate.
It’s so much easier to attack hobgoblins and scapegoats than to actually engage tough questions.
petr says
Why do people want to believe that “one weird trick” will solve their weight loss difficulties? Or that a single pill will make them into an instant Cassanova?
Why do people want to believe anything? Because… It makes them feel good.
johntmay says
So who profits? The individuals selling the Cassanova pills and one weird trick weight loss methods profit with the examples you gave.
Who profits when people believe in lies about guns and health care? It’s those individuals profiting that we need to focus on, fight against. We’re wasting our time disparaging the people who believe the lies.
SomervilleTom says
Today (Monday, 2-Apr-2018) we see a clear demonstration of how voters who choose ignorance are destroying our world — I refer to today’s decision to roll back auto emissions standards.
There is absolutely NO excuse for any person of legal voting age and with even a TINY ability to comprehend the world we live in to choose this path.
This is a path that brings death, destruction, and calamity to each and every community in America and even here in Massachusetts. More gas guzzlers. More traffic. More climate destruction. More wars. More devastated communities, ruined by cheap gas and gas-guzzling vehicles.
All this chest-thumping and angst about calling a spade a spade is brought into tight focus when our democratically-elected government makes TERRIBLE policy decisions this way.
bob-gardner says
It didn’t take long for the Ohio Democrats to stab the students from Parkland in the back.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/dennis-kucinich-seizes-on-gun-control-to-propel-his-underdog-gubernatorial-campaign
Christopher says
That’s an awfully interesting set of issue comparisons between the candidates. I did not see an attack on the Parkland students in the article, however.
bob-gardner says
I’ll try to keep it simple for you, Christopher, and do this in stages. First, try to think of an issue that the Parkland students really care about. I’ll give you a hint. The initials are “G.C”.
Christopher says
No need to be patronizing. Of course I know what Parkland students care about. Kucinich is all in for gun control and Cordray not so much, though it seems evolving a bit. I did not see any attacks on the students referred to in the article and not agreeing with them 100% does not constitute stabbing in the back.
bob-gardner says
Cordray is a hard line gun nut. But he is a good fund raiser. The Ohio party ‘s choice to support him is insulting to the Parkland students and a gift to the NRA.