Obama wins one more

By Max J. Castro

The Supreme Court handed President Barack Obama an unprecedented – and largely unexpected – second major victory last week when it upheld the constitutionality of the key provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Last week was beyond huge for Obama. Monday, the Supreme Court sided with the administration in throwing out three out of four provisions of Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant law. That ruling supercharged Obama’s already significant lead over Mitt Romney among Latinos. As a result, Obama could win more than 70 percent of Latino votes; a level of support that most analysts believe would make it extremely hard for Romney to prevail in November. Then Thursday the Court handed Obama an even more colossal victory when it affirmed the constitutionality of his health care law, derided by Republican critics as “Obamacare.”

Health care reform is the most significant accomplishment so far of the Obama presidency. A loss in the Supreme Court would have meant Republicans could claim in their campaign that Obama had accomplished nothing in his first term, and that the former constitutional law professor had championed an unconstitutional measure. Such an outcome seemed very likely given the rightward lean of the court and what one law professor has called the Court’s “extreme hostility” to the Obama administration.

The 5-4 opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, an extremely conservative judge appointed by George W. Bush, surprised everyone, especially Republicans who were primed to gloat over a crushing defeat for Obama. Instead, conservatives were stunned and appalled that a Chief Justice who until now had a virtually perfect track record of siding with the right had supported the Obama position on two issues of great national and political significance – immigration and health care – in a single week!

The 1960s was the last time health care reform of this magnitude was approved in the United States. Admittedly, Obamacare, or the Affordable Health Care Act, is deeply flawed. It preserves the fundamental nature of the type of medicine practiced in the United States: mercenary medicine, health care as a commodity like sugar or cars rather than a human right. The law also ensures and probably will increase the huge profits and some (although not all) of the prerogatives of the predatory health insurance industry.  
These two flaws means that health care, like the Pentagon’s budget, will continue to swallow up an enormous percentage of the nation’s GDP – in both cases the largest slice by far of any country in the world.

These twin black holes which consume huge slices of the United States’ economic pie –mercenary medicine and the military – don’t produce any value for the American people. In fact, they cause great harm to American society. Studies of countries in which the government pays all health care bills have found that such “single payer” systems are extremely efficient as measured by very low administrative costs. They also cover 100 percent of the population, something the Obama reform will not achieve even if it survives the fierce repeal effort already begun by the GOP. The government-run Medicare and Veterans Administration health systems in the United States are also very efficient.

In contrast, mercenary medicine comes with very high costs. Insurance corporations exact huge profits and have high administrative costs, much of those devoted to finding reasons to deny claims. They also spend a lot of money on advertising and, more scandalous of all, on bribing politicians and whole parties – or what is euphemistically called contributing to campaigns.

But the pernicious effects of mercenary medicine go beyond the ironic fact that it provides the large sums needed for the industry to buy the political influence required to maintain medicine as a mercenary pursuit. Beyond the inherently corrupt nature of this arrangement, the money looted by executive with astronomical salaries, and politicians with insatiable appetites for money to perpetuate themselves in office, rob the economy of the money needed to create a decent society.

The money parasitically diverted by the profiteers of mercenary medicine – much like the bloated military budget which has more than doubled since the “Soviet threat” disintegrated – are dollars subtracted from education, infrastructure, and myriad other human needs.

Yet, in spite of the sum of these problems, the Supremes’ decision on health care reform represents progress. The main reason is that 30 million people who currently lack health insurance now will be covered. That is a middle-sized country’s worth of people benefitted. It means many unnecessary deaths, diseases, and broken hearts avoided: no small achievement. It also means another victory for Obama, which can’t hurt him in November. Americans love winners and disrespect losers, whether in sports or in politics.

The dark cloud for Obama and the Democrats is that the survival of “Obamacare” gives the GOP a second big target (the economy being the largest one) against which to aim their political arrows. And the really bad news here is that, despite the increase in popular support for health care reform following the Supreme Court ruling, polls still show that more Americans oppose the measure than favor it.

Whatever happens in the presidential election – and at this point you predict at your own peril – Obama’s health care reform is one of the few developments toward a more decent society in the United States in more than a generation.

In March 2004, as the U.S. occupation of Iraq was descending into chaos and carnage, the late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

“Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America that so many of our generation used to dream of….
“But I know now that that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable.

“Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of killing the morale of our soldiers killing and dying in the Middle East?

“Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces, they are being treated as I never was, like a toy a rich kid got for Christmas.”  

Does health care reform, with all its shortcomings, mean that there is still a little hope for that more humane and reasonable America Vonnegut once dreamt about and later despaired of ever seeing?

Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of history is long but curves toward justice. In the United States, for several decades now, the arc of history has been curving in the opposite direction. I don’t know if this extremely modest triumph of reason and humaneness marks a turning point. But I do know for sure that if Mitt Romney and the Republicans prevail in November, the arc of history will take another sharp turn toward injustice.