The long drive home from Concord is part and parcel of serving in the Senate. Our crimson electric car, Sparky, is fun to drive, but I still turn on the radio to break the tedium. Last week, to avoid impeachment hearings, I searched for a new station and landed on a deep-voiced talk show host. He was reprising Elizabeth Warren’s remark to a father who asked whether her college-debt erasure plan would reimburse him for the loans he had diligently paid off. The host seconded the man’s indignation when she responded, “Of course not.” I found myself agreeing.
But then the show headed in a different direction, one that opened my eyes to how talk-radio works. After developing empathy through the angry dad story, they began equating college loan forgiveness with healthcare coverage for all.
“See?” the female co-host chirped, “you don’t want to be forced to pay for someone else’s college as well as your own. That’s why people who have high healthcare bills don’t want healthcare for all. They don’t want to pay for someone else’s medical bills.”
I frowned at Sparky’s windshield. “Huh? If you have high expenses, then, actually, other people would be paying for your procedures,” I argued with the radio. “That’s the way insurance works: The healthy subsidize the sick. Good drivers pay for bad.”
I imagined the talk-show host’s reply. “Yes, but now you choose whether you want health insurance. Healthcare-for-all takes away that freedom.”
I continued the debate in my head: “Is not going to the doctor, because you don’t have enough money to pay, freedom? Skipping meals to buy heart meds? Is that freedom?”
By this time, I’m off the main highway and turning south, as the hosts enjoy a rant about socialist fools who want the government to take their money.
“So you prefer fools who want corporations to take their money?” I thought. Do they not know that we spend $2 trillion per year and rising, for an average life span that is 38th and falling? I later discovered that the US trails not only the developed nations, but Curacao, Barbados and Guam.
Back home, Bill and I get supper started. He listens to the hearings in the background, while I check emails. There’s an invitation, from the Sununu’s policy center, to a speech against the rising tide of socialism. Another, from a constituent, bemoans youth’s infatuation with socialistic candidates for president.
“But who can blame them?” I thought. The Right refuses to admit that capitalism has been laid low by cancerous corporatism and greed. Healthcare costs are the tumor on our economy that prove it! If we want youth to embrace capitalism, we need to cure it.
I will be voting for Amy Klobuchar on Feb. 11 because I believe she will both excise the cancer and keep the patient alive. But youth do not remember what capitalism with a strong middle class looks like. They may well vote for more radical amputations. They may strive to lock out, forever, those who still claim our society is not sick. But “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
I hope America can make it. I hope that after hearings and a contentious election, we have leaders whom most of us believe in. But the cancer has been debilitating. Our democracy may need some of its vital organs replaced. Fortunately, the next generation is learning to regenerate those now. If we let them, they may revive our nation, in this new decade, with a whole new heart.
Jeanne Dietsch of Peterborough is a state senator representing District 9.