Do you ever sit back and wonder, Why are we doing it this way?
Take, for instance, America's decision to proffer healthcare protections to its elderly.
Pardon my candor but wouldn't it be smarter to dedicate those resources to our youth?
Youth is where health is established and youth is where the focus on healthy living is most likely to produce a lifetime reward on personal and social levels. This is the wiser investment of common dollars. It's a significant investment in the future as well as being a profound investment in the present well being of members of our society.
Don't get me wrong, it's a noble thing for a society to protect the elderly and see to their care in every way.
In my perfect country, cradle-to-grave access to full healthcare coverage would be among the rights that our politicians both recognized and refused to trespass against. But as a contemporary social matter with dwindling common resources to devote to ensuring health among the lucky few, it's not the wisest approach to concentrate those resources on the elderly.
For a moment, let's imagine that our policies can be designed to build lasting success rather than paper over the guilt of creating an economy that leaves most Americans incapable of covering their healthcare expenses in their sunset years. From the time a child enters our school system, they are officially entering and beginning to make a contribution to society (in the form of learning). And that is certainly an appropriate time for society to kick in with something like "K-through-B.A." healthcare coverage.
A quick look at the numbers reveals the average high-end annual cost of $1,080.00 for a young American. Even if we nearly double the figure to $2,000.00, to account for seeing to the healthcare needs of college-aged people, it still makes sense when we consider the average annual expense of $5,531.00 for an elderly American.
Granted, honor demands that there will be a transition period when we must shoulder the expense of doing both. I'm not down with shafting people who were counting on our help.
So how do we pull it off?
End futile wars. Relentlessly pursue peaceful forms of conflict resolution and guaranteeing security. We need to rethink our commitment to the kind of "forward defense" that so often results in armed conflict and get back the the Peace and Prosperity ethic.
Reallocate funds that were once commanded by our military industrial complex.
Create a stronger, more equitable economy.
Create a healthcare fund, much like Social Security, that the general fund can never borrow from. (It wouldn't be a bad idea to officially apply criminal embezzlement statutes when the general fund borrows from Social Security too, by the way, seeing as how the general fund "borrows" Social Security funds the same way drug addicts "borrow" money from your purse.)
Shouldn't we be using our common funds to build solid foundations for people rather than apologizing for our lack of economic sensitivity?
"We care" is in the doing, not in the saying--especially after sixty-five years of financially shortchanging people.
On that, I don't pretend to speak for most Americans (or even the people I generally agree with most of the time) but I don't want to live in the country that modern Republicans and their teabagger wing are trying to build here.
I reject, outright, policies that are creating a caste system in the United States. I reject the idea that a nation has no direct stake in the quality of healthcare and education its citizenry gets. I reject the logic that the United States must become a third-world-come-lately to keep our employment options open. I reject their vision of society as a heartless mass of disjointed souls who can only be legitimate and looked after if they start living for the afterlife.
It's not healthy for the country to negotiate to the center from where they start. I think it's high time we insist on better and tell them to get with the secular-government program or get out.
There are literally hundreds of places for modern conservatives to go if the only thing they want government to do is announce to exploitive employers that they're "open for business" while telling its people to go pound sand.
There's no reason our State Department can't write nice letters of reference to help modern American conservatives find their bliss elsewhere. They can hop from one failed experiment with their vision after another for all I care, trading in citizenship the way most of us trade in vehicles or homes, because it's their zeal for rough-and-tumble capitalism they care most about. They want to live in a world of big winners and big losers, and I'm willing to help them do it--somewhere else.
I want to live in an America that's got soul without state-sanctioned religion and a good head on its shoulders. Lucky me! That's what it was designed to be. Making it happen? That's up to us.
Update: I want to make it absolutely clear that I'm not advocating rejecting the needs of an aging population that has current Medicare benefits or a reasonable expectation that Medicare would be there for them. By "reasonable expectation" I mean people currently fifty and older, maybe even forty-five and older. Or maybe means is the better way to determine a reasonable expectation.
In any case, I have nothing against older generations. And I have not made the case here to "abandon the elderly." I just want to make that perfectly clear. If that's what you think you've read, and it pissed you off enough to accuse me of wanted to bump off the elderly, please re-read it before commenting.