With the election looming large over our country, the questions that each election begs of the nation to mull over change. This election cycle’s linchpin question seems to be on healthcare and the role of the American government in healthcare. I can say, with clear conscience and full heart, that the only moral and ethical option we can take is toward Medicare For All, especially as it has been proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders. The integral parts of American life, what we as Americans define ourselves as, demands the compassionate, complicated, leap into the modern age with healthcare.
Critics of this plan are quick to say that it will harm our economy, that we cannot afford to take care of the sick, dying, mothers and fathers-to-be, and anyone else. I ask them to reflect on why we have these markets in the first place. The accumulation of wealth should be used to help those less fortunate than us. The neoliberal status quo loves to remind us that the free market lifts the poor from poverty. But if we are not using this money to better fund the least fortunate among us, what is the point? What are you arguing for? It is inexcusable that in the richest country on earth, at the richest time in history, that we only now begin to really ask ourselves how much it will really cost.
Many in this country find that Christian faith and heritage is an American trait in and of itself and boldly declare this nation to be a Christian one. Perhaps, then, we should act like it. How can we abide by the system that has left the poor and the downtrodden to die when the rich, who have exploited and tossed them aside, are treated and cured to the highest degree? Have we forgotten Christ’s reminder that, “as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me,” Matthew 25:40? Or that, “whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and He will repay him for his deed,” Proverbs 19:17? The utterly discompassionate behavior of those who claim the faith and yet have twisted it into such a painful contortion of self-serving, self-congratulatory babbling is sickening. Any behavior like this, that takes advantage of the less educated and the less well-off should be condemned by not just the Christian community, but our nation at large.
Charity, while a beautiful act of compassion, has failed in its mission for universality and cannot be held accountable in the same ways a government program can be. The program will take time to be normalized, but in the end we will have taken a massive step toward a government we can be proud of, one that takes care of all of its citizens, not just the richest and best off and a massive step toward accomplishing the American dream.
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