To Have and have not

I was watching and listening to President Obama last night, addressing the joint assembly of Congress on his drive to introduce health care reform. The speech, containing a passionate and detailed plea to act with great expediency towards a health scheme that benefits the greatest possible number of Americans, deserves support. The Industrialized World has only one member that cannot provide the bare minimum of care for millions of its citizens: America.

When the home-grown financial fiasco blew up in our face a year ago, it took government and Congress less than six weeks to pass $1.1 Trillion to bail out the banking and insurance sector with funds borrowed on behalf of the yet to be born generation. Yet, the fact that tens of millions of Americans could have engraved on their tombstones "Failed by the Health Care", and that millions of people are one mishap away from bankruptcy as uninsured or under-insured citizens, has failed to alert lawmakers to act; for generations. When it comes to healthcare, America is a land out of a gloomy Charles Dickens novel.

This has to change, and, in the words of President Obama, "to change now." The debate, mostly seized by right-wing opponents to date who enjoy full health coverage anyway, has to shift now to the millions of victims of the current system. We do not owe it to the late senator Edward M Kennedy, as Obama has told Congress, but to the estimated 28 million Americans who are suffering abysmal fears of losing access to even minimalist health coverage, decent treatment and the devastating prospect of hopeless and irreversible destitute.

The debate must be wrestled out of the hands of Fat Cats who enjoy the full benefits already, and whose irrational paranoia of "anticipating a worsening of the current - dysfunctional - system" could give them a dose of (withheld) medicine in the future, has in the past paralysed any progress. Similar to the debate on abortion, where either religious freaks or people beyond the mental and physical condition to conceive or bring up children are the loudest voices, the debate on health care reform has been dominated by those who do not know what it's like not to be included in the coverage.

To maintain a two-tier system for so long, for those who have it and those who don't, is disgraceful, shameful and appalling. For his effort to change America's last Big Shame, two thumbs-up for President Barack Obama.